Peter,

I have to heavily push for Markus Egger's Advanced OOP. Not only are the concepts critical to programming in today's world, but Markus is a very concise writer - I found it to be one of the best written technical books I have ever read. Depending on your level of OOP proficiency, this book, in my opinion, is an absolute must.

Many of the other books are very good and teach you things specific to this technology. That's a good thing, since that's what you're working with. But Markus' book goes well beyond that into OOP theory, which is something that will be with you no matter what OOP language you are working with. And, in my opinion, for anyone not formally versed in OOP (i.e. me a year ago), it's not really possible to take advantage of VFP, or any other OOP language, without understanding these concepts.

Finally, if you're not very experienced in OOP techniques, this book will help you better understand The Matrix. Really - I read this book just after the movie came out, and I saw an entirely new level to the movie! The Wachowski brothers are geniuses! But I stray. Advanced OOP is the most important programming book I've read in the last couple of years.

>>>Definately 1001 Things and Effeective Techniques. You'll also want to get Advanced OOP. My guess is that if you're using FoxExpress that you'll want that book too. I haven't seen the Frameworks book yet.
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>>Count me in for the same. Read effective Techniques last year, awesome. 1001 things is fantastic (all the PITA code snippets you've never gotten around to writing is in there), I'm going through the OOP book now and it is great so far.
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>>< Roi channeling through Craig >
>
>
>Thanks to all that replied. It looks like the weight of opinion is to buy these three books first:
>
>Microsoft Office Automation with VFP (Granor/Martin)
>1001 Things You Wanted to Know about Visual FoxPro (Akins et al)
>Effective Techniques for Application Development (Booth/Sawyer)
>
>I specified that I had already decided to buy the Automation book. The Hentzenwerke blurb says that "1001" makes a great stepping stone between "Hacker's Guide" (which I have) to "Effective Techniques". Sounds like a winner to me.
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>That would leave these three books for later:
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>Advanced Object Oriented Programming (Egger)
>Creating VFP Applications with Visual FoxExpress (Archer/Jorden) (available soon)
>Building Visual FoxPro Frameworks (McDaniel) (available ?)
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>
>Thanks again. I'll fax my order in tomorrow.
>
>Peter