About the Author

Les Pinter is the author of six books and more than 280 articles on database development. He received a master's degree from Rice University in Houston, Texas, and finished the coursework for both an MBA and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston. He joined with Mike Griffin and Bill Radding in 1980 to market the Magic Wand, the fourth word processor ever written for the CP/M operating system, and sold the source code to a 23-year-old Bill Gates, who used it to build Microsoft Word a year later.

He moved into the database field with dBASE II and dBASE III, then migrated to FoxBASE during a project at LucasFilm's Skywalker Ranch in 1987. He published the Pinter FoxPro Letter for 10 years in the United States and for four years (together with Dmitry Artemov and Igor Medvedev) in Russia.

Les is Contributing Editor of Universal Thread Magazine, published in Montr al, Quebec, Canada. He is a member of the INETA Speakers' Bureau, and frequently speaks on database development in Latin America. Les was selected as a Microsoft Visual FoxPro MVP in Fall of 2003. Les does seminars and conferences on FoxPro and Visual Basic .NET in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Russian. He lives with his wife Ying-Ying in San Mateo, California. Les is also a private pilot.