Walter,

I agree with what you are saying here. When you are first starting out with VFP books are very, very helpful and can give you the overview you need. But once you've been programming in VFP for years you have to dig through books to find new stuff. So then you get into the catch 22 with VFP. There are not lots of new VFP programmers coming into the market so it's not cost effective to make a VFP for Dummies and probably few of us on here would care if they did. But at the same time the veteran VFP programmers needing only the most advanced stuff tend not to buy books even if they are geared toward the seasoned VFP developer.

I think when you are looking to publish you have to look at emerging markets or at least markets that are still maturing.

Greg

>Hi Marcia,
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>>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.
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>>< 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?
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>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.
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>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.
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>>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.
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>>Well, you must be a lot smarter than I am < s >. Personally, I can use all help I can get.
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>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).
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>>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.
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>>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 >.'
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>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.
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>Walter,