Beginning REALbasic: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice) [ペーパーバック]

I'm honestly surprised at the good reviews this book has gotten. I own literally hundreds of technical books (and have even helped write a couple), and believe I know good technical writing when I read it. Good technical writing makes the reader more enlightened, not more confused and frustrated. But after spending several trying hours with this book, the latter is just how I feel.

I don't doubt that Mr. Ford is a whiz programmer, and has a thorough understanding of the subject. But it's quite a different skill set to be able to convey that understanding in a methodical and enlightening way.

There's certainly a lot of information in this book, and much of it is helpful. But what drove me up the wall, among other things, is the subtle penchant the author seems to have for assuming that you already know what it is that he's referring to, even before he's actually bothered to explain it.

Thus, one of the first things I looked for was a brief Glossary of key terms and concepts. ... There wasn't any.

Failing that, I resorted to the Index -- which turns out to be quite hit-or-miss as well. A cursory search through the book reveals that certain key terms appear a full *80 pages* or more before their earliest reference in the index ("module" and "method" are but two examples).

And a handful of key terms don't even appear in the index at all! (Omissions I quickly chanced across included: class[!] ... declare ... intrinsic ... literal ... variant. And I'm sure if I continued to plow through this tome, my guess is I'd find a bunch more.)

Additionally, some passages describing key concepts scream out for a well-placed diagram or two. Instead, they're conveyed through languorous prose. (Example: Classes/Subclass/Super Class, on pages 209 & 211.)

There's also circumlocution: for example, on p.117, Mr. Ford goes on about how "difficult" it is to preview how menus will look under different OS's ... and then in the very next paragraph, demonstrates how easy it is!

But the last straw, and what spoke volumes to me, was a number of minor typos scattered throughout the text. Clearly, if I could find a bunch of these in just the first hour or two of reading, then clearly there wasn't a decent book editor/proofreader assigned to the case. (Someone worth their salt could also have helped spruce up organization of the content, and made it more accessible in general, with respect to much of the above.)

In spite of this book being billed as for "Beginners" and "Novices" -- I frequently got the impression that it's really targeted for *experienced* programmers (who just happen to be transitioning from some other language, like Visual Basic).

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm a very technically-savvy guy. And I really don't have an axe to grind. I just didn't know RealBasic ... which is why I bought this book! It's too bad there's such a dearth of current material on this intriguing cross-platform development environment, and thus, more choices of good books on the subject.

Nevertheless, based on all the foregoing, you may consider looking elsewhere (even at older books, by more established authors), if you're looking for a genuinely well-written introduction to the topic. As soon as I finish posting this review, I'm going to do the same.

[Addendum, 7/8/07]:
Yesterday, I just happened to run across the author's latest book, "AppleScript Studio Programming for the Absolute Beginner". Surprisingly, it's far better and seems to address many of the weaknesses from this book, listed above. But unfortunately, it's not about RealBasic! The notable difference in style, though, is enough to confirm my hunch that what "Beginning REALbasic" could have used was more rigorous editing and insightful layout, by someone knowledgeable about presenting technical material. Hopefully, someone will catch onto this for a future edition ... or perhaps some other author will give the subject a go. In the meantime, I'm going to return this book, and pick up the Neuberg and Tejkowski ones instead.

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.

My first introduction to Jerry Lee Ford, Jr.'s work was an introduction to VBScript and WSH which was just plain awful. Thus I was a bit leery of ordering another book by him.

I'm pleased to report that Ford has done an excellent job of providing a solid introduction to REALbasic. It is indeed a basic introduction and may be too insubstantial for very experienced programmers. For beginners through intermediate, though, I think it's a fine piece of work and easier to work with than REALbasic's own tutorial manual.

Ford provides an overview of REALbasic first and contrasts it with VisualBasic. By page 58, he has the reader constructing a simple, but impressive, REALbasic application that does a nice job of demonstrating how easy it is to program REALbasic for simple tasks and how versatile it can be. He then moves through creating menu structures in REALbasic and other basic programming concepts.

Chapter 8 is a pretty good basic introduction to Object-Oriented Programming. Chapters 9 and 10 introduce text file and data processing. Chapter 11 covers graphics and audio and Chapter 12 covers debugging. Example programs are provided for each chapter. None of them are overly complex, but all do teach you the basic features of REALbasic.

All in all, it's well done for the new to intermediate level programmer who is coming to REALbasic.

Jerry