Who Should Read This Book

If you are standing in the bookstore sipping a latte, flipping through this book and trying to decide whether to buy it, there's a good chance you'll fall into one of the following groups:

• Novice programmers who want to get their feet wet programming in REALbasic.

  You may be someone who has never written a line of programming code before. You could also be a former AppleScript scripter nursing repetitive stress injuries from having to type so many sentences of grammatically correct, but horrifically wordy, English-like code in order to set the value of the first word of the first paragraph of the document in the front-most window of application such-and-such to value something-or-other.

• Experienced REALbasic programmers who want an updated reference on the new features found in REALbasic 2005.

  A lot has changed with recent releases. You need a reference to guide you through all the new features and to help you negotiate the challenges of cross-platform development.

• Visual Basic programmers who want to learn about REALbasic and how to port applications from Visual Basic to REALbasic.

  If you fall into this category, you may have an existing Visual Basic project you want to port to REALbasic so that it can run on Macintosh and Linux machines. You also may be looking for an alternative to Visual Basic 6.0 rather than "upgrading" to the latest .NET Microsoft twiddling.

• Other experienced programmers who are thinking about making the move to REALbasic.

  There are even a few Java developers malingering in the shadows of the bookstore who, while deeply loving the ever-proper, thoroughly stable and dependable Java, still long for something a little easier, a little quicker, maybe even something with a little more gloss on the old user interface.

I'm sure there's even one or two Linux developers who are frothing at the mouth at the chance to have a commercially supported rapid application development tool so that they can quickly create new Linux apps. In fact I think REALbasic could be the very best thing that ever happened to Linux. The release of REALbasic 2005 could represent the leading edge of an explosion of Linux apps that will bring the open-source operating system into the mainstream.