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"This book is a developer's handbook designed to take the intermediate to advanced level Visual FoxPro developer right to the heart of developing a real live application."
I wish I had read these words more carefully before my purchase. Unfortunately, I bought the book on another's advice. If you are "intermediate to advanced level," you have probably already developed a "real live application." And having done so, you have already learned just about everything in this book.
The book is really a standard text on VFP's basic features. As such, it is decent, certainly better than the Microsoft documentation. The foundation classes included perhaps take it a step higher; they are good learning tools for a beginner or intermediate who has never put together a complete application in FoxPro. I found nothing in the text, however (and I read through most of it) that I would say is distinctive to the topic of "enterprise development". If you have an application or two under your belt, even in VFP 3.0, and you're looking to go to the next level, this book has nothing for you.
It is not a basic book for the very beginner. You should at least be a little familiar with the previous (pre Visual) Foxpro way of doing things. It contains the following Sections:
- Analysis and Design. Establishing development standards.
- Object and Coding Development. OOP. Debugging. Multi-User development.
- Database Development. Creating a database and SQL.
- Application Deployment. Clients/Server. VFP and Internet applications. Distributing VFP applications.
I highly recommend this book for any serious VFP5 programmer
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"There are many ways to distinguish a good software development project from a mediocre one. You can look at the appearance of the screens, the way the application behaves, the structure of the underlying tables, or the source code itself. Each of these items tells you something about the developers who built it."
The finished application, World Wide Shoes, which is included on the CD and purported to be the end result of working through the exercises in this book, speaks volumes about the author and the publisher. The application is amateurish and of poor quality. It represents few of the development standards outlined in the book.
I get the feeling the author has studied programming theory, but has done very little application development.
This book is a must for any serious Visual FoxPro Developer. Hopefully, the tradition of excellence will continue with a version 7.0 of this book in the future.
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The only reason I did not give it 5 stars is that I think it went too much into discussing development methodology.
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