Well, based on the mentions here I popped over to Amazon and had a copy shipped over.
Don't hold your breath for this to do any good for Revolution. Or Programming. Or even Computing. What we have is a series of topics, with the most sketchy illustrations imaginable, for each of the following platforms: Liberty Basic, RealBasic, C++, and Revolution. To give you a flavor, we get to p 175, which is about 'storing stuff in arrays' and by the end of p 193 we have covered static and dynamic arrays in C, multidimensional arrays, and 2D arrays in all of those platforms. Half or more of these pages are occupied by the simplest sorts of scripts - so simple that the differences between them are minimal. If any end user (or maybe anyone else) can read these pages and have the slightest idea how to write any useful program involving an array, they need not read Beginning Programming, because they will have an unusual ability to telepathically obtain howtos from the ether. If only! What would be a better approach? Get Dan Shafer's book revised for a third edition, some introductory parts slimmed down, a few more details on some of the topics, a few more detailed howtos, and put the CD with the express edition with it. Particularly expand the parts about storing, retrieving and deleting data. There's too much about the user interface, and too little about how to write stuff that deals with the data which is why the end user is writing the program in the first place. But, small criticisms aside, 'Software at the speed of thought' is really excellent for a first introduction for a sophisticated end user. It is everything that the Dummies book is not - it just needs to go a little further. And have the express edition packaged along with it. Get some detailed material on how to work with arrays, lists, and tables into the Revolution pdf. While at it, also get some account of how, given that I have sqlite installed already on my Etch machine, I get Revolution to talk to it.... After all, there are a host of free Linux apps starting with Kexi and Knoda and Rekall that do that. It seems to be the simplest way to get yourself an external data storage without having to fire up a database server. Oh dear, Revolution could have done so much better! Well, others may differ, but that was my reaction. I wouldn't even give this thing to the local charity shop, it could put someone off computing for life! Peter _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
