Form design is just another way of defining were and how the controls are placed int the work area (form)....Learning the basic structure of the coding language is very helpfull, and the "old BASIC" books can help a lot with that... Also controls can be created and placed in runtime, not needing any work in the form designer, if you want to understand how forms work, try a searh for "vb forms creation" or similar and you will find lots of usefull tuturials , that althought created with a nother coding language in mind, are very similar in the making to what B4PPC uses....But note that Not all properties and events used in those tutorials are available in Basic4PPC....
It could be more confusing than help. Read the help file for b4ppc and read the examples. take parts of the examples and write your own. Trial and error is a slow way of learning but it works. Thats how I started 27 yrs ago.
Thanks for your opinion, bdiscount!
Only reason I thought that the book might help is that it offers more than just a short illustration of something and gives you some background on the reasons or concepts behind why you do things a certain way. That's the one issue I have with just looking at examples, etc is that I don't often know why it's done this way versus that way or sometimes what I'm looking at....
As for time it takes to learn, I hope that I can do it in less than 27 years as I'll be in the old folks home by then, if I make it that long, given my current age.....that's why I keep looking for relatively simple ways of accellerating my learning curve, besides the fact that since I work full-time (more than 40+ hours/week...) I don't have lots of free-time and unfortunately, don't have time right now to take a programming class or something like that.
My original thought that may have been very naive, was that by working with an onboard device IDE like basic4ppc offers, it would allow me to take advantage of the bits of free time that I do have periodically at lunch at work or between meetings, etc. Such that over some months I thought that this time would add up to something where I could make some progress....
I recommend you to start with a Visual Basic 6 book rather than .Net (2003 / 2005).
Basic4ppc is built upon the .Net Framework and does resemble some of its characteristics, however it is more closer to VB 6 which is not an object oriented language.
In Portugal we have a saying:
"IF you find someone who is hungry, don't give him a fish, teach him to fish"
I relate 100% to you, I alway try to understand why "its done that way", oposed to "it must be done that way"
My background in coding has always been about BASIC, and I had stopped mess around with it for about 10 years, So when i pick it up with Basic4PPC, almost everything had "gone with the wind"...and I had to re-load all the keywords to my system again...
I was back codding in a week or so and had my first ever really complete app in about one month, so I would expect that those 27 Years you mentioned , really become abou one month or two for the basics, the rest, beeing basic4ppc an ever upgrading development tool, with all the new dll and such, will forever be a learning experience worth the while....
PS.: I would be up for the challange of writting a "hard-cover" book of basic4ppc, both in english as in my home language, but I figure I would need (lots of) help.....Anyone???
Umm... thought it went like this:
"Give a man a fish, you'll feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he'll spend all his time in a boat drinking beer!"
or was it:
"Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life."
As for the book, I'd be willing to help out. Obviously, not as the code guru, but could try out what you come up with and give you feedback as to what is clear and comprehensible to a noob like and what is not, etc....Once it got going and I get a bit further along (assuming that I do... ), then I might be able to make some suggestions as to what topics would be useful to have included....
Very strange sayings you have there....:sign0142:
Thank for making yourself available to help me.... I have started the Introduction....
This will be a slow develop project as my time is mostly used with Familly and Work( I know it doesnt seem that way, but it is...), But I'll endure on it... adn with evreyone help, it will become a reality.