I agree. I first started with FoxPro just this July. I purchased 3 books to get me started. One was the Hacker's Guide. I read the other two, and they were definately worth reading, but I still use the Hacker's Guide every day. As Sylvain states, however, the FoxPro help is also a necessity, as there are some features of FoxPro that are not covered in the Hacker's Guide. Hacker's Guide refers to the FoxPro help in most of these cases.
I have the benefit of a multiple monitor setup, and when I get into work in the morning, I fire the Hacker's Guide up on one, and FoxPro up on the other. Makes coding and solving coding problems VERY easy. (Now, if only I had a third monitor for my Universal Thread fix!)
>The Hacker's Guide is a must and I would recommend it to anyone. However, even if I'm refering more often to the Hacker's Guide than the VFP help, it doesn't replace the VFP help. The Hacker's Guide does a great job on explaining how to use each commands and functions, but lack some info found in the VFP help (see AError() for an example. The Hacker's guide doesn't give you the structure of the array.)
>
>They mention in their introduction that it is not aimed at replacing the VFP help, but I wish that they bite the bullet and include all informations found in the reference section of the VFP help in the next version so that I don't have to navigate from one to another when I'm looking for help. I know that it could be impossible to create a printed copy, unless you have the constitution of Arnold :), but only the CD would be of great value.
>To me, this book is worth at least twice that. The first 150 pages [the book is printed on letter size paper
unfolded] are a
synopsis of VFP 6. Then you have over 700 pages that gives the
poop on every VFP function, command, method, event, property, etc. This includes how the item works, how it was intended to work [not always the same], cool tips, and gotchas.
>>
>>This book is what VFP Help should be. Now kick in the right to download the material and be able to access it all electronically, and you have a bargain. My F1 key in VFP is still the default VFP Help, but Alt-F1 brings up the Hacker's Guide CHM [HTML Help].
