Advanced programmers

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Becky Schaly" <bschaly at ashlandcounty.org>
To: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Friday, July 14, 2006 2:26 PM
Subject: RE: Advanced programmers


> They have added a beginner's section to the Aug dates and my boss is
> considering sending me.  filePro is the database we use in our office
> for which I began working in Feb 2006...so I am a user, not a
> programmer. I would be interested in feedback about how useful these
> sessions would be for me.  In particular...will it teach me how to make
> sense of the current database processing?  Will I come away being able
> to make effective changes immediately?  Or, will it be way over my head?

You will be AMAZED at what you can do immediately.

When I first encountered filepro, I was actually just a user shopping for 
replacement software for our non-y2k compatile system in '99
I went for a week long visit to the software authors in Alabama and ended up 
unwittingly learning the basics of filepro usage in a few hours one day just 
in the course of taking in their presales demo / training. They weren't even 
trying to teach filepro, they were just answering our questions about "can I 
search by this?" "can this report have this and that on it?" etc...
Next thing I knew I was making new menu choices, creating and modifying 
reports and other output forms, creating and modifying indexs to search by, 
creating and modifying screens, creating and modifying saved selection sets 
and browse formats...
All without having yet seen a single line of programming code or even knew 
what a process table was or how they are used.
I didn't even really realise yet thats what I was doing. I thought I was 
just learning how to use the application.
Only later did I realize I became about 1/10th of a filepro developer in 
about 2 hours during a software pre-sales pitch one day. :)

It's nice for developers to make apps as slick and simple as possible for 
the users, but even one hour of training in the basics of filepro itself 
will make a user of any filepro-based app something like an order of 
magnitude more powerful.

One of our customers was studied by an efficiency expert, a professor of a 
local (to him) university, who studied several large businesses all in the 
same field of business, and all using different software and having 
different basic business procedures outside of their software. He said our 
customer was the most efficient and the margin was a large one to the next 
runner up. He stood way out ahead. And the main reason was their software. 
The users had the power, those that chose to learn just a little extra, to 
get things done a lot faster and/or get things done at all. A lot of that 
was because of just plain filepro itself I'm sure. The learning curve is not 
steep. You get a lot of bang for your buck right from the start.

I couldn't say how good these particular classes you're looking at will be, 
but in general I say without question a few hours of beginner stuff will be 
worth tons from almost any source. I'd go. You're lucky your company has the 
foresight or insight to even value that but it will sure pay off that they 
do.

The only special connection between filepro and unix is that it was first 
developed on unix and still has some features that are only 
availabe/possible on unix.
There are now some things that are only available on windows too though.
Other than that it's just that it's the most stable environment for for any 
back-end type app whether written in filepro or anything else.
I think it's also fair to say simply that a lot of the people who like one 
(filepro or unix), for whatever reasons, also like the other.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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