FoxPro Developer's Guide

OUT OF PRINT
M&T Books

 



This is the essential guide for FoxPro development. This book covers:

  • RDBMS Theory
  • Database Design
  •  SQL Basics
  • FoxPro Programming
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    		 Foxpro Developer's Guide
    (Dbms Magazine's Database Foundations Series)

    by David McClanahan et al;
    Published by M&T Books 1992

    If you are responsible for developing with FoxPro--either a single application or an entire system--then you need this book!.

    DETAILED DESCRIPTION

    Written by expert database developer and one of the developer's of FoxPro David McClanahan, the Foxpro Developer's Guide is designed to teach all developers--expert or novice--everything they need to design robust data models and to create FoxPro applications. The Developer's Guide provides the instruction and example source code needed to implement the most important and most common application tasks. All the details necessary to understand and build effective applications are included, covering database design, error handling, transactions, and optimizing performance are also discussed.

    David McClanahan is a well-known database consultant who has worked in every phase of database design and client/server development. He is the author of many technical books and has contributed nearly 100 articles to the leading database journals, including Databased Advisor and DBMS Magazine and Enterprise Computing, for which he was a regular columnist. He currently writes columns for DataBased Web Advisor Magazine and PowerBuilder Developer's Journal. He was a developer of Foxpro.

    Fragments of The Foxpro History


    "Brought from a message posted in a Google thread, in 1997"

    Fox Software was a small company started by Dr. Dave Fulton and a bunch of his graduate students in Ohio, who were doing custom computer consulting on the side, I think. They figured they could write a better dBASE than dBASE. And they convinced other people they had done it, by going to a dBASE convention and asking people to run their own PRGs and applications under the FoxBase environment, where the code immediately ran faster. No code changes, just better technology underlying the same Xbase language features.

    ....

    At the same time, SQL and the idea of optimized data access through new index types (Rushmore optimization) entered the language. This was how Fox 2 kept breaking new ground in the speed/efficiency dept.

    There were many heroes in the original team, including Amy Fulton, Dr. Dave's wife and the original architect of the RQBE (the visual tool that was intended to do for the SQL additions to the language what the other tools did for Screens, Reports, Projects and Menus) and     Dave McClanahan, who did a lot of the original SQL work, and Walt Kennamer, who wrote FoxDoc as Snap! before he joined Fox as COO. I'd have to mention Janet Walker, who guided just about every facet of the development, from what I can reckon.

    Outside Fox Software, people like Tom Rettig and Alan Schwartz (although there are actually no people *like* Tom Rettig and Alan Schwartz < s >) helped grow the community. The two were interfaced by a thriving set of CompuServe Fox Forums, hosted by the company but enlivened by the efforts of many thousands of committed Fox developers, who built additional tools and stretched every ounce of capacity out of the Fox language and data format. Both "in" and "out" of the community was Glenn Hart, who served as a consultant to the company and spearheaded the community effort on CompuServe.

    Glenn's sudden passing was a shock to us all, and serves me as a sort of watershed date in the history of Fox. A few months later, the Fox-MS merger was announced, at a "breakfast press meeting" on the first morning of dbExpo. Dr. Dave and Bill G made the announcement jointly. I remember thinking that it was difficult for any more effective underminding of Philippe Kahn's keynote speech to have been planned, by anybody < s >.

    FoxPro 2.5 DOS and Windows were under development at the time. I believe that the development team (most of whom were going to Redmond) had a committment to get these products ready for release before the final merger. I'm afraid that the timing of RTM for these products had something to do with people wanting to be settled into their new Seattle digs before their children started school .
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