Hi Tamar,

>The point I was trying to make with Walter is that it's hard for me to imagine any serious VFP developer picking up just about any Hentzenwerke book and not getting more value from it than the cost. Nonetheless, there are a lot of people out there who don't think they need to own (or even read) books in their field.

It is not even about the costs. To be clear: I'm a very serious VFP developer and contributed some downloads here as well (E.g. TaxRi and a command window implementation). My bookshelf is full of books unrelated to VFP, but related to software development in particular. I've got a degree in CS (software development) etc. So I really don't need people tell me how to write OOP designed systems. I graduated on the subject of relational database systems, so I don't need people to tell me how to design a database. I subscribe to a hardcore database magazine which keeps me update on developments of RDBMSs in the field.

I've posted numerous programming tricks up here of which a number are published in VFP books (which I never have seen myself).

It is just like that about everything that is published in books is available on the internet also. I read a lot of articles on the internet and take many ideas from other software and see how this applies to my VFP projects. I don't feel like reading a 300 page book from cover to cover to find what I might need. If I need something, I'll search for it, or else build it myself in either VFP or C++.

>Someone else in the thread complained about $129 for a monthly 16-page newsletter (FoxTalk). If that person bills at $50 per hour (which I think is low for a VFP developer), he only needs to save a little more than 2 hours from something he learns in those 192 pages. There's never been an issue of FoxTalk yet (and I have every issue here in binders) where I didn't learn something.

I learn every day. From posts here on the UT, the wiki, MSDN, WWWC, Google, etc. I don't see the advantage of a paper magazine. They get lost, and even if It is in my file cabinet I spend more time to walk to it, search for the appropriate issue, browse through the pages for the relevant article, and file it again, compared to do a simple search on the UT.

Walter,