>>
>> >I know there is a discussion currently about the best Foxpro magazine.
>> Well, I want to know what the best Foxpro book is/are. I've purchase
>> enough Foxpro books (mostly based on older version 2.5/2.6) to start a
>> small library and is not about to contribute too many more. Specifically,
>> a good book about proper use of OOP as it applies to Foxpro would be nice
>> with detail sample applications/codes. Lastly, yes I know I could browse
>> through the local bookstore but not all bookstores carry enough
>> Foxpro-based books to make a good judgement. What do you recommend???
>>
>> My favourite is still "The Pros Talk Microsoft Visual FoxPro 3"
>> :)
>> Nick
>
>Hi Nick, John,
>
>I've not read 'The Pros ...', but I have found that the lack of
>litterature is one of signs that VFP is in trouble. There is probably a
>good reason for this: it must hard to write a book about VFP because of
>its internal inconsistency. This being said, as far as I know, VB does
>not score much better on this account, and look at the wealth of
>litterature (at least that is the situation here in Antwerp, Belgium).
>
>Most of the books are suffering of the "What you know is in the book,
>and what you do not know you will have to find out by yourself (or as
>Vlad says, ask him and his friends on the UT)" syndrome.
>
>I _have_ found one book on VFP that I did like though:
>
>"The hacker's guide for Visual Foxpro" (The book is at the office, I
>cannot give you more information at this time). It is a lot of fun to
>read and it is full of good tips that are very useful. But most of all
>it convinced me that I'm not allone in my judgement of VFP, a language
>which when one is fluent in FPD is to say the least difficult to
>apprehend.
>
>Another "must" is Alan Cooper's "About Face". This is as brilliant as
>the cover says it is. It will not tell you anything about Foxpro, but
>then, no book will. You might as well invest your time in finding out
>which terrible blunders you designed and why your users look at you in
>bewilderment sometimes. I do not know about you but it happened to me
>more than once, and to my shame I found out why reading Alan Cooper's
>book.
>
>Finally, you did ask, did you not :), if you want to lear about OO ...,
>well learn about OO. Mind you, my first application runs in VFP
>without a single object in it. It is quite succesful and runs like a
>charm.
>
>I read a lot (well a lot, you know what I mean, I have a family to feed,
>and projects to finish :)) about OO, here's the bibliography:
>
>Succeeding with Booch and OMT methods by Lockheed Martin
>Object Solutions by Grady Booch
>Design Patterns by Erich Gamma et al.
>Analysis Patterns by Martin Fowler
>Object Oriented Methods by Ian Graham.
>
>And what did I find out? Well OO _is_ a lot of fun. But as a theory
>it is far from stable. Every author puts more or less what he wants in
>it and leaves out what he does not want. More important, in our line
>of business it is not even that relevant, because our tendency to
>approach analysis and design with the relational paradigm that is, to
>put it mildly, only partially compatible with OO.
>
>But I definitely picked something up from the reading. My second
>application is OO. As I said, it was more fun to write and it works
>very well too (probably the accepted it better also because I followed
>some of Alan Cooper's leads :)).
>
>I think you should stay away from the VFP cook, eh code books à la Alan
>Griver and his framework, or Savanah (I forgot her last name, no offense
>intended, the book again is at the office). They are misleading. You
>have to convince yourself that OO is an approach, not a technique that
>you can learn, or worse a kind of library where everything is premade
>and easy to use, and these books tend to make you expect something else
>(it did this to me, I do not know about you.)
>
>That's it.
>
>Regards,
>
>Marc

Marc, are you finished? Just kidding :)
I have to agree with you on lack of "quality" reference books in general. Like I said in the original message I have purchased enough books to fill a small house. I think part of the reason why I (we) can't find a lot of good books is because we demand more from them now. In the past, programming (especially using Foxpro) was relatively easier than it is today. All the new features of todays software makes it almost impossible to include enough info in one book. At least that has been my experience at the bookstore.
I've also have read a little about Patterns and OOM and OOP as it is applied to software design and found a lot of them admittedly "over my head". Anyway, I think I'll give "The Pros..." a try since it did get at least 2 votes. :)