Foreword

Foreword

to Advanced Object Oriented Programming with Visual FoxPro 6.0

I met Markus Egger on the VFP 3.0 Beta forum. I''d never heard of him before I saw his name on a whole lot of messages that were asking questions that I only began to comprehend. I remember saying to myself, ""Who is this guy?"" When I finally met him in person, he was introduced as ""the guy that''s doing cool things in FoxPro with Rational Rose."" I thought, ""What''s Rational Rose?"" It was painfully clear to me that I had some catching up to do. What made it worse was that it all came so easy to Max. It still does. That''s why I jumped at the chance to do the edit on this book. I may have been the editor, but I was also the first person to benefit from Max''s tour de force in writing about oObject-Ooriented Pprogramming for Visual VFPFoxPro.

If you are like me, you''ve struggled with OOP for at least six or eight years. I remember sitting in a conference session hearing words like ""Ppolymorphism"" and ""Iinherited behavior"" and not having a clue about what the speaker was trying to tell me. It seems like it was just yesterday, but it was really quite a while ago. Since then I''ve read book after book on the subject and have even written some code that I considered to be ""Oobject-oriented."" Bit by bit, I''ve pulled myself up to the point that where I feel comfortable talking about the subject and sitting down at a computer to write some of it.

You can understand my surprise when, in the process of helping Max with the organization of the this book and, from time to time, with his English, I started really learning from what I was reading. The more that I read, the more I liked what I was reading. This stuff was good! Things were falling into place! I was learning! (Even editors can learn;, it may take longer, but we can learn.)

Anyone reading this forward foreword has to have an interest in object-oriented programming in Visual FoxPro. This is called ""natural selection"" in computer terms. Until now you could buy good FoxPro programming books and good (sometimes not-so-good) object-oriented programming books, but you couldn''t buy a good Visual FoxPro OOP book. It just didn''t exist. If you share my experiences, you know the pain of going through a book trying to understand the C++ book examples of object-oriented programming. The language is different, the projects are different, and the basic outlook on application development is different. The experience was is always frustrating, and you walked away from it with less than a complete feeling of satisfaction. Advanced Object Oriented Programming with Visual FoxPro 6.0 is going to be a breath of fresh air for you.

Max has done all FoxPro programmers a real favor with this book. I recommend it as a good first book for FoxPro 2.x programmers that who are just making the move to VFP. I recommend it for people who are in the middle of the learning curve and need a good reference. I also recommend the bookit for people who consider themselves in the top 1% of VFP programmers. Advanced Object Oriented Programming with Visual FoxPro 6.0 truly has something for everyone. Yes, there''s a discussion of Iinheritance, eEncapsulation, and Ppolymorphism, but there''s also a good discussion of doing two-way work between object models and Visual FoxPro object code. Like I said there's something for everyone here.

Not only is there something for everyone, but theThis book has some of the most comprehensive progression of the book and the discussions of the are one of the best comprehensive discussions of the process of object-oriented development that I''ve seen and it''s all oriented to FoxPro! If your "'thing'" is Java, don''t buy this book. If it''s Visual FoxPro, you''ll want to keep this book in your "'Llet''s sSee Whwhat tThey sSay aAbout tThis sSubject'" pile. I kid you not.

Mac Rubel, -- New York, February. 1999

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