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Title: REALbasic Cross-Platform Application Development (Developer's Library)
ISBN: 0672328135
Author:
Mark S. Choate
Publicate Date: 2006-04-22
Publish: 2006-04-22
List Price: $49.99
Average Customer Rating: 2.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $4.99
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $2.85
Amazon Merchant Price: $34.99
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Excellent guide to programming with REALbasic
Mark Choate's "REALbasic Cross-Platform Application Development" is one of the most comprehensive books about REALbasic currently available, not to say "the best book" about this (still exotic) language overall.
While beginners may be scared about the 656 pages, they definitively should leave their fears behind and give it a try. Although the book isn't the typical starter's tutorial, the author has taken any effort to explain all important aspects of object-oriented cross-platform programming in a way even a novice computer user with some background knowledge may understand it.
The contents cover all major topics of programming with REALbasic, so even professional software developers familiar with Visual Basic or any other programming language (Perl, Java, etc.) will find this book a good source of diving into the world of REALbasic.
Luckily the book isn't overloaded with screenshots and other space-filling things (like command references or charset code tables), so the 656 pages you get are 656 pages full of useful information, straightforward explanations and consistent programming examples.
There is just one little negative point to mention: The book is dated 2006, so the underlying REALbasic version is from 2005. That are over three years... a long time, seen the fact that REALbasic is updated several times a year. On the other side, all provided information are still valid and no fundamental changes have been applied to the language since this version was released.
All in all, "REALbasic Cross-Platform Application Development" can be recommended to everybody interested in this programming language, novice users as well as experienced developers.
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2: Waste of money and time!
I bought this book to learn REALBasic and especially the database stuff. This book is full of typos and non working code examples and there is no errata available in the hard to find website where it is to be found. Buy Beginning REALBasic by Jerry Lee Ford, Jr. instead.
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3: I liked this book
Having bought almost all of the Realbasic books over the past 2 years, I have read them without comparing my impressions with those on Amazon's pages. So I found the negative comments on this book a surprise.
I think the O'reilly book by Matt Neuburg is the best book, overall, but I learned things in Mark's book that I hadn't found elsewhere.
The writing style is a bit casual so you can see quick diversions in focus away from the topic at hand, but it did not get in the way for me. It felt more like how you would talk to a friend, as opposed to a shotgun approach.
I ranked this book as my second favorite, followed by Jerry Lee Ford's book.
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4: I beg to differ
I found this book AMAZINGLY helpful! I'm a Java, C and C++ programmer moving over to RB because
it's cross platform and has a very easy GUI development system. I DON'T need another book to answer
what a byte is, how to write a loop or how to do Object Oriented Design.
This book does not coddle you. It assumes you know the basics of programming. It assumes you know
what you want to do. It will tell you how to do it. I have sticky tags all over my book, and it lives
at my right hand on my desk. It tells you all the strangenesses of RB on the different platforms, and how
to do the harder things. First read all the other books to learn the language. THEN GET THIS ONE!!!
You will be using it consistently.
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5: Timely and informative
Choate's book is well-organized and timely in my opinion. Like Neuberg's Definitive Guide, it describes Rb's classes, controls, and built-in functions in detail, but in the context of today's capability. The chapter selections are good and there is a very readable 21-page index. It's very useful, for example, to have all of the Array functionality described in one place. The emphasis in the book is on the language functionality as opposed to duplicating the User's Guide describing the IDE. In addition to basic functionality, the book is especially strong with respect to text processing and encodings, the shell class and console application development, networking features, and codeless and coded database interfaces.
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