New topic: RB not suitable for beginners?
<http://forums.realsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?t=29702> Page 1 of 1 [ 1 post ] Previous topic | Next topic Author Message Stevekir Post subject: RB not suitable for beginners?Posted: Sun Aug 23, 2009 2:39 pm Joined: Wed Apr 29, 2009 11:04 am Posts: 19 Location: UK Why? Because there are no longer any workable step by step guides or tutorials taking the beginner beyond the very first steps of learning the IDE contained in REALsoftware's excellent step by step Quick Start Guide and their Tutorial. I started in RB 5.5 a few years ago and used Peachpit's Visual Quickstart Guide for REALBasic on the Mac. That gave me the three things that I think a beginner needs: step by step instructions to make standalone working projects which between them contain many of the main features. I restarted on RB a few weeks ago by upgrading to RB 2009 Release 3 at a very acceptable price because I wanted to master RB and in particular to make a certain application that involved file handling (File/New, Open, Save, Save As) including styled text. It took no time to work through REALsoftware's two simple step by step documents mentioned above, with no bugs. I then turned to my Visual Quickstart Guide, noticing that it was published in 2003 and covered RB 5 and hoping, for economy reasons, that it was not too much out of date. I followed Chapter 2 on building an HTML Editor which was designed to produce a working project that demonstrated the design of the window interface and file handling and other things. It produced many bugs, due to the considerable differences in RB since version 5. Help from this forum got it working eventually. I then wanted to design my own project with file handling using the up to date code snippets in the RB Beginner's Guide and the Language Reference, but quickly got nowhere. Bug after bug, even when using Methods ("the method or function does not exist") etc. clearly shown in both documents and typed correctly. DaveS on this forum said "why not use a more up to date set of documentation?" Good advice. So I decided to let the moths out of my wallet and buy the version of the Quickstart Guide for a much more recent version of RB. Horror! There is none later than my 2003 edition. So I trawled the Internet in the US and the UK to see what was available for the beginner. Here is the result (and I am prepared to pay good money for a book that seems right): Visual Quickstart Guide. Not available and Peachpit have no plans for a current edition despite offering a Guide for Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard). REALbasic - The Definitive Guide, by Matt Neuberg (O'Reilly). A very good book for the expert, full of explanations and concepts, but only a very few pages devoted to, for example, file handling and no complete examples in a runnable project with variations covering, say, styled text or dialogue boxes. Also, it was published in 2001 and no later edition is available. Beginning REALbasic by Jerry Lee Ford. Amazon's Product Description includes step by step instructions. Published before 2006 (three years or more old), quite expensive and subect to a bad review on Amazon describing its lack of practical clarity (so important for beginners). I don't buy books unless I can see fairly clearly that they will do the job, having been bitten so many times. RB Library. http://www.rblibrary.com/rblibrary/index.php I looked at "Files for NOOBs" at $4.99. Two good reviews (on their site!), the latest dated March 2007, so their guide would surely have out of date code (alligator traps for beginners as I well know). The "Beginning Object-Oriented Programming with REALbasic, $9.99, had several reviews on their site, the latest being June 2009. However, collecting even a proportion of their guides on selected areas could be expensive. But the killer is that the site makes it clear that the guides cover up to RB 2007, so alligator traps are possible, and anyway the total price is too high for a leap in the dark. Realbasic Cross-Platform Application Development by Mark Choate. (Sams). No sign of step by step instructions and quite expensive. Some very bad and some very good reviews on Amazon UK. Seems to cover RB version 5, so more alligator traps. REALbasic for Dummies by Erick Tejkowski. 2001. Nuff said! Really Basic REALbasic http://www.ttpsoftware.com/ReallyBasicRB/ Helpful minichunks of coding and explanations. But their Sample Project # 17 Open, Save, and Save As threw a bug which was not repairable, and another crashed RB 2009R3 REALbasic Developer Magazine Bound copies of past issues. Expensive, and inevitably mostly out of date. If I have missed any please reply. Its a huge disappointment that Peachpit's Quickstart Guide is no longer usable. ------------------ So, the conclusion? There is no suitable beginners' guide to RB which the beginner can use to write a useful range of runnable code which he/she can experiment with and which is sufficiently up to date to avoid bugged code. I don't feel that I can burden this forum with repeated elementary bug problems. So I personally will have to be content to write only window (I don't mean Intel Windows) interfaces containing Controls etc. whilst trying to puzzle out bugs due to out of date code, and avoiding file handling and possibly other areas such as databases. Compared to other complex softwares used by beginners such as video editing or 3D modelling, mastering a computer language is much more difficult. I think that this is because the others do not refuse to run if a tiny mistake is made such as a misplaced comma in a language â they still operate and you can see, with your eyes, what has gone wrong. The error messages for RB are comprehensive but the "Method or Function does not exist" drives me up the wall when it is one in the L. Ref. with the correct syntax. Another problem is that REALsoftware issues updates so frequently (three this year!) which can result in bugs and undoubtedly deters book publishers. If I were REALsoftware I would be worried about this. As any company, they rely on new buyers, and I think that the lack of availability of practical beginners' guides leading to runnable projects that beginners can experiment with will deter customers not in a commercial environment and therefore not prepared to pay the high cost for many days of class tuition. RB is not a beginners' software. If anyone out there has a working Project running RB 2009 R3 that has fairly comprehensive file handling, offering it on this forum would be a great help to many beginners. Well, that's my conclusion. What a pity. RB is so attractive in so many ways. _________________ G5 Power PC, OS 10.5.7, 1 GB RAM, RB 2009 Release 3 Top Display posts from previous: All posts1 day7 days2 weeks1 month3 months6 months1 year Sort by AuthorPost timeSubject AscendingDescending Page 1 of 1 [ 1 post ]
-- Over 1500 classes with 29000 functions in one REALbasic plug-in collection. The Monkeybread Software Realbasic Plugin v9.3. http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/realbasic/plugins.shtml [email protected]
