>I'm going to go against *someone's* grain here. (ascends soapbox)
>
>On the one hand, one certainly needs some background in what Microsoft has written about the language - after all, they are Fox's current owner. On the other hand, to truly understand the concept of of object-oriented programming, I think you need to look at sources outside of Microsoft's world. I think the best book I've found for getting the object-oriented "religion" is David Frankenbach's book in the "Pro's Talk" series (yes, I know he's here, but the book worked for me). Savannah Brentnall is another excellent author in this regard. Once you have the concept of OOP in your mind, you can go to VFP, C++, Smalltalk or any of the other OOP languages and understand the individual implementations much more easily.
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>Once you've made that kind of study, you will realize an additional danger of relying on Microsoft's examples - much of the code in their Fox examples is not truly object-oriented - it resembles Visual Basic more than anything else, which is not an OOP platform - and some of it is just plain poor quality. In particular, much of it relies on pre-OOP methodology which can be written much more cleanly now as OOP code.
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>(descends soapbox and slides it over to the next speaker... :) )

(Takes soapbox and climbs on - Thanks, David)
IMHO, there's a lot to be gained by looking at the code that comes with different books. My first VFP app was written with a combination of ideas from Jim Booth's and Savannah Brentnall's books. From them I learned about containers, about application objects, and much much more (a belated thanks, Jim, Savannah, et al.) Eventually, you'll have to start your own library of base classes, your own data-entry and non-data-entry forms, etc., but looking at others' code will help you avoid a lot of pitfalls.

(Climbs off soapbox in turn, leaving it for another orator)