All this talk of perl tutorials (on the main list) moves me to ask a
question about tutorials for Base (Open Office).
I'm not sure if I want to buy a manual at this point because I don't
know yet if I want to really get into it beyond my current need.
So far, the tutorials I have found online are not that great. The one I
decided to try first was written by someone who seems to be only about
one or two levels above me. That would be all right except that he has
aimed his tutorials at people who are many levels below, people who are
*completely* green. _AND_ he diverges often.
Can anyone point me to good tutorials that assume at least a basic
understanding of databases?
One thing I'd like to do may not be doable, at least not the way I
imagine it. One small part of what I'd like to do is this: I will have
a table of keys for cars. (Since key means somethings else in database
context, I will refer to the brass kind as "kee".) Some of these kees
(k1, k2, k3) have substitutes (k1a, k1b, k2a, k3a, k3b, k3c) that can be
used. Some of the substitutes (k1b, k3a, k3c) have secondary
substitutes. Some of those secondary substitutes are the original kee
(k1, k3). If a car requires k1, I want to show that it could also take
k1a or k1b. If another car calls for k3a, I want to show that it could
also take k3, and by extension, k3b and k3c. I would prefer to *not*
have two separate tables with data entered twice (increasing the risk of
typos, and preventing corrections in one list from propagating to the
other). But the only kind of referencing I can think of ends up being
circular since I don't know of a way to get one record to point to
another record as an acceptable substitute. It's complicated. It's not
a one to one relationship either, which complicates it further. It
would be nice to have a second table which has each record linked
table-1
---------
rec kee
num info
---------
0 k1
1 k2
2 k3
3 k4
4 k1a
5 k1b
6 k2a
7 k3a
8 k3b
9 k3c
table-2
-------------
rec pri sec
num kee kee
-------------
0 0 4
1 0 5
2 1 6
3 2 7
4 2 8
5 2 9
6 5 0
7 7 2
8 9 2
Line 3 of table-1 isn't even referenced in table-2 because it has no
substitutes.
That's only a small part of what I want to do.
I have some knowledge of database work, but not graphical. I worked in
the guts of FoxBasePlus (not Pro). I took a program for work and
tripled its size (or more) by taking away the ugly stuff, adding
features, and making it easier to work with. I had *zero* knowledge of
database programming before that. But good knowledge of BASIC gave me a
*huge* leg up on it because of similarity in terms and function. I only
had to learn the stuff that was *not* similar, and most of that was
self-explanatory from the context in the old program. And the rest I
learned from other sources.
--
Ralph
--------------------
How do you test an uncooperative intelligence when it's smarter than you?
--Stewart Stremler
--
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