Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Visual dBASE 5.5 Programming in 21 Days (Teach Yourself in 21 Days)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is an excellent book, that taeches using independend and complete programs with uniques details for beginners.

This book is better than most because it takes you step by step through the creation of complete programs. After building about half of the programs in the book, I was already writing my own programs. This is a basic book for beginners. After mastering the basics, I found that I was better equipped to participate in on-line discussions to get my more advanced questions answered. The manual that comes with dBASE 7 is almost completely useless, but it becomes a little more understandable after reading this book first.

This book is a big disappointment. It misses everything on the basics of OOP. It won't explain anything about classes, methods or even variables. Big thumbs down ! BTW : if you are interested in multimedia, there are 3 chapters devoted to it. However, I would prefer them in a separate book than sacrifice on the essentials of OOP.

As a newcomer to VisualDBase program, this book was very helpful in a project at work involving updating and revising an old DOS-based DBase application for the Win95 environment. My only complaint is that the authors assume you've bought the compiler as well as VisualDBase 5.5. It would have been helpful to mention in the introduction that you'll probably want to pick up the compiler/professional version of the program if you have any intention of creating applications which are of use on a machine which doesn't have an installed copy of VisualDBase 5.5. Otherwise, the examples were clear and built well upon preceding topics.

I had programed in dBase for DOS many years back but knew nothing of the windows environment. I looked at many of the books related to Visual dBase 5.5. They delved into creating tables, etc. that I already knew. This book got right down to basics. I loved it. I had spent months digging through other dBase books and found less than I did in this books first week's lessons. Now I'd like an encore

I wrote a lot of dBASE programs many years ago first for C/PM, then for MS-DOS, left it, then found a recent need for it again, to run on a Windows system.

I bought this version of dBASE, along with a couple of books. Figured it was an old enough version that I could quickly learn it, that the syntax would be similar to what I already know, but a new enough version to ru on a modern computer. BUT IT WON'T RUN ON WINDOWS XP OR XP PROFESSIONAL

I also own a Mac. Over the years OS X has become bigger and bigger, as has Windows, but kept running faster and faster on older computers with no hardware upgrades. AND I could buy an older Mac program and find it to run flawlessly. That's ending, but I never fully appreciated Mac's long-term backward compatibility until I tried to make a Microsoft OS do a little less than what the Mac OS done, and saw how badly it failed.

BTW - I also run Windows 3.1, including my antique dBASE programs, on my Mac.

How any of the other reviewers can say this book is any good is beyond me. I can only assume they are beginners who lack any experience at all using visual dbase. Visual dbase uses OOP. A point completely lost on the author of this book and I assume the other reviewers. It is the one of the worst books I've seen on visual dbase. No I'll revise that: It is the worst book I've seen on visual dbase.

The book was generally helpful, but the authors seem to forget about reports and creating toolbars and classes. I guess that I expected too much from such a simple book.

Shows reader a-z on dbase. Highly recommended

This book keeps telling the reader to use command line entry. To set up a form takes 3-4 pages when OOP does it in about 2 seconds. There is no real information in this book. You could learn more abour dbase from a book on cookery. It is useless. An expensive waste of paper.