Hi Marcia,

>I don't know if I'm going to agree with this. I don't recall having trouble finding anything that I did eventually find.

>< lol >!!!! I am not sure what you mean by this. You mean you found what you were looking for immediately? What aboout the stuff that you didn't find < s > ? Or did you find everything you ever looked for on the web? And everything that you found was of superior quality?

What I tried to say, that everything I search for (VFP related) I either found rather quickly or not at all. for example I've search for a good strategy to resize items on my desktop when it got resized. I never found it until someone came up with a clever mechanism in subclassing the _Screen object. If it was published in books, I would have found it on the UT also.

About quality. Well, I'm not sure what you mean with quality. I'm never searching for a total solution, but rather for a specific item. In many cases it does the job or does not.

>I'm merely defending myself in not buying VFP books. I'm perfectly capable of programming my way out of a paper box (remember the trick of getting a record showing at the top row without using setfocus?). I don't spend a whole lot of time to find specific code solutions to problems. I'm comfortable enough to find them rather quickly. I spend more time in analyzing the client needs, designing and straightforward programming than findoing out how I to create a mailmerge, send an email, set up a layered application, how to write a C/S / n-tier application.

>Well, you must be a lot smarter than I am < s >. Personally, I can use all help I can get.

That are your words, not mine. I don't often find myself in a case where I need a solution that is directly VFP language related. I've been a VFP programmer for a long time and have build up quite a significant library of classes which help to ease my pain. I spend more time in finding workarrounds for bugs found in VFP (note that I have reported about a dozen bugs in VFP 8 here on the UT).

>If you're honest, you will agree that the UT, WIKI, MSDN, google newsgroups do contain a wealth of information. Far more than you'll ever find in any book.

>If I'm honest, I can tell you that there is more information on the web than I'll ever find in a single book. But that does not address the issue of the quality of that information < s >.'

I'm not sure what makes you think you cannot find the same quality on the internet found in VFP books. Remember I'm looking for solutions to specific problems and a book can be of good quality, but if it does not anwer my questions then it still is rather useless. For newbees the game is bit different I think, because then a book can give you good a start in providing a global overview, but for the more advanced developer I see far less value.


Walter,