Out and About (Con't from page 2)

Seminars, it promises to bring you up to speed on

the Internet in just one day. In Anaheim (Dec. 21),

Burbank (Dec.14), Long Beach (Dec.14), Costa

Mesa (Dec.21), Los Angeles (Dec.12), San Diego

(Dec. 11), and Santa Monica (Dec. 18). Cost is

$79. For additional information, or to register, call

800/255-6139.

Since We Last Met

This is important!! Please check your mailing label on this newsletter. Beginning in December, we will be “weeding out” the newsletter mailing list. Due to increasing costs (our meeting room, etc.) and returned newsletters, it has become necessary to “streamline the list The first cut will be those labels reading “Exp. xx/xx/92” and “Exp. xx/xx/93”. After December, members with these expiration dates will no longer receive the newsletter. In January, we will be eliminating those labels reading “Exp. xx/xx/94”. In February, we will be eliminating those labels reading “xx/xx/95”. I know it’s easy to forget to pay the annual membership fees, but it’s becoming increasingly important that the slack be taken up.

Running With the Big Dogs. Coming as a surprise, only in that it happened sooner than expected, Novell announced it was selling off its Wordperfect and Quattro Pro lines of software to basically anyone that can come up with the cash. Novell took a real soaking on this deal. Purchased for $855 million dollars, Wordperfect has been somewhat of an albatross around Novell’s neck. Industry analysts are estimating the current value of Wordperfect at between $350 million and $425 million, leaving a net loss (not including millions in advertising) of at least $400 million. And their Office Suite of products, which was supposed to ship shortly after Windows 95 is nowhere on the horizon, almost four months later. Quite a hard pill to swallow in the wake of the well-oiled Microsoft marketing machine. So the lesson learned here about buying “also-rans” in an effort to gain market share is, “If you can’t run with the big dogs, stay on the porch.” Novell says it now intends to concentrate on the office networking products that were its original strength. It could be too late, with the advent of an extensive advertising and VAR campaign by Microsoft on the NT/SQL product line (i.e., the Net Results ‘95 conferences held locally here

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[Ed. Note: Last month, Savannah Brentnall promisec to send us a list of authors and books that would “widen our horizons” as VFP developers, as well as plant our feet firmly in Object Orientation. Here they are:]

Booch, Grady. “Object-Oriented Design with Applications.” Benjamin/Cummings. ISBN 0-8053-

0091-0

Provides a comprehensive description of object- oriented design methods, using the popular Booch notation. Also includes five real-world application designs, each implemented in a different language. Languages covered are Smalltalk, Object Pascal, C++, CLOS and Ada.

Brentnall, Savannah; Sander, Ellen; and Gunn, John. “The Visual Guide to Visual FoxPro.” Ventana. ISBN 1-56604-227-5

OK, so I’m biased! This book is aimed at beginning to intermediate FoxPro developers, not users. It covers all the new features of Visual FoxPro, and includes

Gamma, Erich; Help, Richard; Johnson, Ralph; and Vlissides, John. “Design Patterns.” Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-63361-2 Contains a series of object-oriented designs that are aimed at practising 0-0 professionals, This book doesn’t explain how to design object-oriented applications; rather, it provides a set of proven designs for typical problems. These designs can be implemented in almost any object-oriented language, including Visual FoxPro.

Gnver, V. Alan. “The Visual FoxPro 3.0

Codebook.” Sybex. ISBN 0-7821-1648-5 The FoxPro 2.6 Codebook was one of the bestselling FoxPro books around, and it’s author is a well- known speaker and industry figure. The Visual FoxPro version isn’t a guide to the features of the product; instead, it provides guidelines on how best to use those features. The Codebook discusss business reengineering and the ways in which it can be supported by the Visual FoxPro object model. Meyer, Bertrand. “Object-Oriented Software Construction.” Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-629049-3 An old favorite, and still a useful reference. This book explains the idea of “programming by contract,” and

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