Beginning REALbasic: From Novice to Professional

This book is necessary for most people beginning REALbasic programming, including those who consider themselves experienced or professional programmers. It is an introductory book, that acquaints the reader with REALbasic nomenclature and design better than other available books. However, you should not expect to be a professional programmer after completion of the lessons in this book. REALbasic is too broad and too complicated to reach that level of achievement with this book. It's a good book for procedural programmers to quickly learn about event-driven GUI programming and object-oriented programming. If you've used other windows-oriented programming tools like VBA, xCode, or LabView, the learning curve will be easier. The book is well organized, and acquaints a beginning REALbasic programmer with nomenclature and the fundamental capabilities of REALbasic. There's a programming example in every chapter that teaches the user a new aspect of REALbasic's capabilities [controls and window types, multimedia of various kinds (graphics and audio), making icons, text I/O, some programming logic, an introduction to database capabilities, debugging, and object oriented programming within the paradigm of event-driven GUI's]. The lessons become increasingly sophisticated and build on previous knowledge. Explanations of the functioning of programs are generally good, but not in depth. For instance, the real capabilities and usage of combo boxes for I/O needs more depth. Reference resources are cited ( but many are dysfunctional). There are some problems with this book that, in all fairness, often result from other sources. This book does not essentially discuss (generic) windows control - perhaps an oversight in a windowed programming environment. Things like opening, closing, positioning windows. It's not apparent to neophytes how to design a "splash" screen, import his own graphics, etc. A CD-ROM with programming examples comes with this book. My CD-ROM was shattered when it arrived in the mail. Apress (the publisher) quickly answered my email about the CD on a weekend! Apress supplies the CD's resources by Internet upon request. Some icon files (.bmp files) are mentioned in the lessons, but not found in Apress's download. The RBCalculator code (Chapter 5 lesson) in the book is different than the same code on the CD. The CD code works. Electronic documentation for REALbasic (the User's Guide and Language Reference), while included in REALsoftware's downloads, is very incomplete. Examples and good definitions are almost totally lacking. Classes and properties need much better definition (not just theory & nomenclature, but what the author's intent means, what things are supposed to do, and how they're intended to work). This book will not fix the deficiencies of REALbasic software. However, REALBasic: TDG (Definitive Guides) will go a long way toward overcoming those deficiencies. I recommend the TDG book as a second (complementary but necessary)

With any book about programming most are looking for tip or ideas on how to "get it done". One book can not to it all. But to learn the User Interface of RB and advance to writing good code this book offers a good start. It will be very useful even with the present 2008 release. I liked the book.

REALbasic is a strongly-typed object-oriented form of the BASIC programming language. It allows you to create full-featured applications that support all of the features of the computer that your application runs on. Thus you end up with a single-file application that does not require a run-time engine, DLL, plug-in, etc. so that your application is easily deployed and installed and stands alone on either a Mac, a Windows machine, or a Linux-based computer. Best of all, the language is easy to learn, and this is one of the best books out there for introducing yourself to it. The author has a very accessible style that truly does take you from the very beginnings of working with REALbasic to teaching you some of what you need to know to build professional applications. He usually starts each chapter telling you why this particular topic is important, and then uses screen shots of the Realbasic IDE to show you how to add functionality to your applications. Instructions are usually given in numbered steps along with these IDE screenshots. Tip boxes are added throughout the book where appropriate, and steps and concerns specific to a particular OS, be it Linux or Mac OS X or Windows, are addressed when applicable. The author usually concludes each chapter with a small application for you to design that tests the knowledge you should have gained, along with a summary. I found it very easy to pick up this language using this book. No previous experience with Visual Basic is assumed, though if the author thinks that a particular REALbasic concept might be particularly confusing for Visual Basic programmers, he adds a note or tip to make sure they don't get started down the wrong path. Highly recommended. The following is the table of contents: PART 1 - INTRODUCING REALBASIC 1. An Introduction to REALBasic 2. Navigating the REALbasic IDE PART 2 - LEARNING HOW TO PROGRAM WITH REALBASIC 3. Creating an Application's User Interface 4. Working with REALbasic Menus 5. Storing and Retrieving Application Data 6. Making Decisions with Conditional Logic 7. Iterative Processing 8. Object-Oriented Programming PART 3 - ADVANCED TOPICS 9. Processing Text Files 10. Working with Databases 11. Working with Graphics and Audio 12. Debugging REALbasic Applications PART 4 - APPENDIXES Appendix A - Migrating Visual Basic Projects to REALbasic Appendix B - What's on the CD-ROM Appendix C - What's Next

Jerry Lee Ford's Realbasic book does an excellent job taking the beginner from knowing nothing to knowing quite a lot. Each chapter is well written and ends with an actual programming project which puts the chapter material into practice. If you don't just use the examples on the CD but actually do the project yourself, you will have created 12 programs by the end of the book. I'm not sure why a previous reviewer thought Mr. Ford was not a teacher as the style is very good and the pace is not too fast. This isn't a For Dummies book, but if you are ready to study it (that is, not just skim a chapter without working the examples), you should do well. And why the previous reviewer criticizes Mr. Ford for not commenting the code when practically every line of every program is commented is beyond a mystery. The book has a few typos, especially in later chapters, but those are very largely in the text itself and not in the programs, or are easy to spot (one program button has ActionButton.Captain instead of ActionButton.Caption, for example, but as buttons have captions (the words written on them to say what they do) and not captains, it's pretty easy to spot this typo, especially by chapter 10!). I recommend this book over Mr. Swaine's book (Realbasic: Visual Quickstart Guide) as this book is much more complete and the programs actually work! I also think it is a better book for beginners than Mr. Choate's book (Realbasic Crossplatform Application Development), which I also actually like, but which is not ideally suited for those starting out. That book would be better used as an up-to-date reference book, much like the now dated but still useful Realbasic: The Definitive Guide by Matt Neuburg. All in all, I think Mr. Ford's book is the place to start for those getting into programming with Realbasic and I have profited greatly from his book.