>good chuckle, Fred! it is rather alarming to see plethoras of books on every other language imaginable, but not a single one on vfp. it is a part of the advertising that is not there. someone standing looking at all those books who is interested in trying his hand at programming won't even see a vfp blip on his radar screen - in other words, it is as though, to new prospective programmers looking for books, that vfp doesn't even exist. it would be nice to see at least one book there. even a 'vfp for dummies' with a disc containing a limited dev environment like all the vb and c books.

John;

For years I have gone to bookstores to see “what is on the shelf”. Part of how I gauged how well FoxPro and VFP were doing was based upon the number of books available on the shelf. We have been told a number of things about book publishing and profits. VFP does not sell enough to consider publishing books on the topic.

Well, Whil Hentzen publishes a number of VFP related books but you normally do not see them at the bookstore. I did see the Hackers Guide at our largest computer bookstore (three locations) in Silicon Valley, but they went out of business. Is there a message there?

I guess the reality is:

1. Only present users know about VFP and sales of the product is aimed at upgrades to present users. Since no one knows about this product outside of the present development community we will see our numbers dwindle with time.

2. Who needs to know about VFP outside of the present development community? We are one big happy family. There is no need to advertise VFP. Remember everything points back to #1 above.

3. Do not suggest anything be done differently about marketing VFP. That will upset some of the present VFP family members and we must not have an unhappy family.

I think if the number of users of VFP was represented by a pyramid, the number of users today would be approaching the top.

Tom