The LA Fox DeveloDer Newsletter

August 1995

The Latest on VFP Books

by Barry R. Lee

Not too long ago, I sent out a question on Compu-

Serve, to some of the more famous authors within

our community, inquiring as to the status of any

books they might be authoring. They were all

extremely quick to respond and here are their

answers:

Savannah Brentnall - “Yes, I do have a book in

progress. It’s with Ellen Sander and John Gunn, and

is titled The Visual Guide to Visual FoxPro . The

publisher is Ventana, and it should be out around

September.”

Les Pinter -. “My book is in final edit, and will be

printed about 60 days from now. So October is the

likely date for gethng into bookstores.”

George Goley - “Thanks for asking. I intend to start

the book in September, leading to a Dec/Jan pub

date.”

Lisa Slater Nicholls - “Thanks for checking in'

“With a bunch of other good people, I’m working on

a book for Ventana Press called Visual FoxPro

Power ToolKit: A Master C/ass for Fox Developers —

but it’s not nearly ready <s> Its not a beginners

book — its more like MAChete (my FPMac book for

Hayden) than my Que DOS and Windows books.

“I don’t have an estimated date of publication yet,

and I don’t think this book belongs in the “first wave”

anyway <s>.

“It will come with a CD and I’m hoping that a second

edition/printing will have both the VFP Mac and

Windows material on the CD.”

Tamar Granor - “Thanks for asking. Our book is still

in progress (that is, we’re still writing it). I’d expect it

to be out mid-to-late fall. The title is “The Hackers

Guide to Visual FoxPro” and the publisher is

Addison-Wesley. Ted Roche is my co-author.”

Y. Alan Griver (“yag”) - “The book should be out by

early September. Here is a message put together

by Ken Levy that describes the book - use whatever

you’d like...”

“There are currently two versions of the Codebook by

Y. Alan Gnver (yag), the first was for FoxPro 2.0 and

the second for FoxPro 2.6. Basically those

books supplied a solution (via source code) for

creating event-driven applications around the FoxPro

READ, a design and coding methodology, and also

including standard utilities for application develop-

ment in FoxPro.

“The upcoming Codebook for Visual FoxPro 3.0

should be available in late Aug. or early Sept. by

Sybex books. In this version, the book and source

code are separated in more specific areas. The book

text, written by yag, will continue to cover issues

about FoxPro standards and methodology, but will

also focus heavily on the topics of object-oriented

technology, client-server, and BPR (business process

reengineenng). This will also include the concept of

3-tier (3 layer) client-server modeling where you

isolate GUI, data store (DBFs, SQL data, etc.), and

the business rules. You may think of the Codebook

text book as an analysis and design handbook for

Visual FoxPro as well as the Codebook souróe code.

“The source code for the new Codebook is primarily

written by Flasher Paul Bienick while some compo-

nents were written and/or designed by yag,

Menachem, (and some utilities by me), etc. It is

basically an application framework for VFP applica-

tion development. What does that mean? Its mostly

a set of common class libraries along with a few

supporting program files. What kind of class librar-

es? The Codebook class library architecture uses

the same naming standards as MFC (Microsoft

Foundation Classes in C++), and uses some

of the same techniques found in MFC and some

Smalltalk class libraries, and also the Visual FoxPro

containership model. The Codebook class libraries

take full advantage of object-orientation by imple-

menting abstract classes and collection classes

which properly support delegation.

“There exists a concept in 00 called manager

classes in which objects of these classes are used to

manage multiple instances of other classes such as

forms, toobars, etc. The Codebook model takes this

concept to the next level by using collection classes.

Just like a form can contain child controls, collection

classes (non-visual) can contain and manage object

instances such as forms, toolbars, business objects,

menu pads, etc. The Codebook also contains collec-

(Con't, page 9)

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