BOTTOM LINE (placed at the top for your convenience): Is anyone
interested in working through Learning REALbasic Through Applications by
Clayton E. Crooks, II, with me? If so, please drop me a note!
On the one hand, the book includes source code for more than a dozen
applications, including an MP3 player, a drag-and-drop multimedia
player, a calculator, a word proessor, a clipboard manager, and more.
On the other hand, if my experience with the book is any guideline, many
or most of the progrms don't work because of bad editing and numerous
errors.
Most of the customer reviews at Amazon.com support me in this:
"Out of curiousity, I read through enough of this book in Borders to see
that it's in right in line with the [lack of] quality I expect from
Charles River Media. Anyone who's mistakenly purchased any book from
this publisher already knows what a waste of trees their books are, and
now so do you. I give this 1 star because the pull-down menu doesn't
have an option for no star at all. If you're already a crack programmer
in some language (any at all), get Matt Neuburg's book (O'Reilly). If
you're more of a novice to application programming, start with Erick's
For Dummies book."
"Sorry. The predominant view has proven once again to be justified. I'm
sorry I let my optimism lead me to purchase this book to find out. It
really is a badly edited collection of unexplained and useless gimmicks.
If there is a concept presented that has any worth in learning to write
your own code, then it is extremely well hidden among the error laden
examples. I have every book on RealBasic available now, and the
O'Reilly book is the only one that truly helps one learn the product AND
programming.... This book cannot claim to teach or build confidence -
although I found it an interesting exercise debugging and proofreading
the text and code - representing perhaps the only real experience to be
gained through the use of this text."
"I got something out of this book, but like the other reviewers have
said, it wasn't that much. It was good to see examples of how to use the
different controls and make little mini-apps. No problem there. But
there were a lot of errors. I wonder if someone actually went through
and did all the programs before sending this off to the printer. There
were inconsistencies with variable names and it got to the point where
half the learning from this book came from the debugging. I must really
understand what I'm doing if I can figure out how to fix the errors...."
http://snipurl.com/82la
Still, the concept is an attractive one, i.e., learning a language
through building applications (that's actually what the REALbasic
Tutorial is all about), so I'm interested in giving it a try, _if_
there's anyone else here who has the book and is willing to give it a
try with me.
Barry Traver
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