What do you think?
Rate this book
WebRAD: Building Database Applications on the Web with Visual FoxPro and Web Connection
A tutorial for novices and a reference for experienced users, featuring step-by-step guidelines for using Web Connection in a day-to-day manner as a developer, this book offers several development alternatives based on the user's style. Demonstrated are the building of two different applications, one easy and one more complex, and nearly two dozen trouble-shooting steps in case of problems. Also explained is the infrastructure of the Internet and, specifically, web applications. Once developers are comfortable building and deploying an application they are then shown how to take advantage of more complex framework features such as file-based versus COM configuration, extending the framework, data entry using object-oriented techniques, and asynchronous applications.
502 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2002
1 person is currently reading
4 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 4, 2007
Not Great, But Decent Considering not many Alternatives
This book gets rave reviews from many readers, but I am not as enthusiastic. I suspect that my difference in perception is due to the fact that I am not a VFP developer, but rather a web developer trying to learn VFP in order to maintain a legacy system that is new to me. The book is really clearly written for the seasoned VFP developer who is new to web development, and not for someone like me who is an experienced web developer needing to learn VFP for the web.
About 180+ pages on extremely rudimentary Internet basics and terminology that anyone doing any sort fo web development should already know. This stuff is really written for someone who has zero grasp of how the Internet/Web Pages/Web Servers work at all, and is essentially wasted space for someone who already has basic knowledge of general web development issues. Examples of things covered in these 180+ pages are:
-How to Install Windows Server
-The difference between a development environment and a production webserver (and staging).
-How to FTP files to the web server (including how to install and use WS-FTP)
-The basics of IP Addressing
-Using PING and TRACERT
-How to Register a Domain Name
-Web Authoring tools recomendations (14 pages of this)
-A Brief History of HTML
-HTML coding basics (13 pages [20 pages if you also include JavaScript and CSS basics])
A good example of how the book really caters to VFP developers and leaves VFP newbies high-and-dry can be demonstrated in the fact that the have a 1 page instruction for how to install VFP and 2 pages for VFP utilities vs 17 pages for IIS install and configuration.
Another example of how the book disadvantages the non-VFP developer is how it assumes that the reader will know exactly how to implement a peice of sample VFP code.
There are also some minor VFP syntax errors and incorrect instructions that most experienced VFP developers would catch and be able to correct when doing the samples in the book. Since I do not know VFP, these syntax errors can be quite frustrating, although I must admit that they may help me to learn the subtlties of the language by forcing me to figure out what is wrong with the code on my own. For those developers in a similar position, Hetzenwerke has created a Updates/FAQ/Errata page on their website that helps considerably:
http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/w...
There are also a few minor gramatical/spelling mistakes in the book, but nothing that is significant enough to take away from the books ability to convey its message. I find this to be quite common with IT-oreiented books these days.
This is not to say that the book is not useful for developers who do not already know VFP. There is some very useful information, but you really have to pull it out of the book. I was also new to Object Oriented Programming (OOP), so this compounded my difficulty. Chapter 16 goes into great the basics of OOP and really shed some light on the structure of VFP and OOP and was *extremely* helpful to me. I wish this chapter would have been cloer to the front.
If you are new to OOP and/or VFP, I suggest reading The first part of Chapter 16 (and doing the exercises) right after you get VFP and Web Connection installed, then go back to the following the book in order until the end of Chapter 12. Then right after you build the sample app in Chapter 12, I would skip back over to Chapetr 16 and read the section titled "Subclassing Web Connection Framework Classes. Thwn go back to Chapter 13 and finish the book. This chronology makes more sense to me, as someone who does not know VFP.
http://www.west-wind.com/webconnectio...
This book gets rave reviews from many readers, but I am not as enthusiastic. I suspect that my difference in perception is due to the fact that I am not a VFP developer, but rather a web developer trying to learn VFP in order to maintain a legacy system that is new to me. The book is really clearly written for the seasoned VFP developer who is new to web development, and not for someone like me who is an experienced web developer needing to learn VFP for the web.
About 180+ pages on extremely rudimentary Internet basics and terminology that anyone doing any sort fo web development should already know. This stuff is really written for someone who has zero grasp of how the Internet/Web Pages/Web Servers work at all, and is essentially wasted space for someone who already has basic knowledge of general web development issues. Examples of things covered in these 180+ pages are:
-How to Install Windows Server
-The difference between a development environment and a production webserver (and staging).
-How to FTP files to the web server (including how to install and use WS-FTP)
-The basics of IP Addressing
-Using PING and TRACERT
-How to Register a Domain Name
-Web Authoring tools recomendations (14 pages of this)
-A Brief History of HTML
-HTML coding basics (13 pages [20 pages if you also include JavaScript and CSS basics])
A good example of how the book really caters to VFP developers and leaves VFP newbies high-and-dry can be demonstrated in the fact that the have a 1 page instruction for how to install VFP and 2 pages for VFP utilities vs 17 pages for IIS install and configuration.
Another example of how the book disadvantages the non-VFP developer is how it assumes that the reader will know exactly how to implement a peice of sample VFP code.
There are also some minor VFP syntax errors and incorrect instructions that most experienced VFP developers would catch and be able to correct when doing the samples in the book. Since I do not know VFP, these syntax errors can be quite frustrating, although I must admit that they may help me to learn the subtlties of the language by forcing me to figure out what is wrong with the code on my own. For those developers in a similar position, Hetzenwerke has created a Updates/FAQ/Errata page on their website that helps considerably:
http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/w...
There are also a few minor gramatical/spelling mistakes in the book, but nothing that is significant enough to take away from the books ability to convey its message. I find this to be quite common with IT-oreiented books these days.
This is not to say that the book is not useful for developers who do not already know VFP. There is some very useful information, but you really have to pull it out of the book. I was also new to Object Oriented Programming (OOP), so this compounded my difficulty. Chapter 16 goes into great the basics of OOP and really shed some light on the structure of VFP and OOP and was *extremely* helpful to me. I wish this chapter would have been cloer to the front.
If you are new to OOP and/or VFP, I suggest reading The first part of Chapter 16 (and doing the exercises) right after you get VFP and Web Connection installed, then go back to the following the book in order until the end of Chapter 12. Then right after you build the sample app in Chapter 12, I would skip back over to Chapetr 16 and read the section titled "Subclassing Web Connection Framework Classes. Thwn go back to Chapter 13 and finish the book. This chronology makes more sense to me, as someone who does not know VFP.
http://www.west-wind.com/webconnectio...
Displaying 1 of 1 review