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 sur-

prise, only in that it happened sooner than ex-

pected, 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 concen-

trate on the office networking products that were its

original strength. It could be too late, with the

advent of an extensive advertising and VAR cam-

paign by Microsoft on the NT/SQL product line (i.e.,

the Net Results ‘95 conferences held locally here

(Con't, page 8)

[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 appli-

cations; 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 best-

selling 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

(Con't, page 4)

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