On Sun, Dec 29, 2019 at 1:12 PM Kurt @ Gmail kurthwendt@gmail.com wrote:
Hey Ted - thanks for letting us know about this. Its pretty cool. I really like that pic of the fox in a wizard type outfit.
The original book, published by Addison-Wesley, was the second in the series of "Hacker's Guide" following Hacker's Guide for Word for Windows by Woody Leonard, which included a wizard on the cover ( https://images.app.goo.gl/HSsTP63kVRmVHZD8A) . Robert Griffith ( https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2503903/) did the design for the FoxPro book, keeping in style with the original, but adding the Fox. It inspired Halloween costumes (http://www.rickschummer.com/images/glgdw/glgdw2001d.jpg)). Many wizards were involved, including contributed chapters from Steven Black and technical editing by the late Drew Speedie.
Am curious to
know Doug's thought process in regards to posting this specific chapter. I mean, yeah, I get it - its listing all the commands and how they work.
Doug would have to answer, I suspect. But the reference guide, which is Section 4, is composed of hundreds of documents, and are the pages I refer to every time I need to review the order of parameters or the trick to using a particular function, or some gotcha I vaguely recall. The other Sections, fore and aft, are longer-form essays explaining why things are they way they are, or how we viewed FoxPro as a whole, the sum of parts (LLFFs, DDE, OLE, ODBC, Fox's SQL, the IDE, the Power Tools, the data engine) and how the whole is greater. So, the other sections are good for reading once, and reviewing occasionally, but Section 4 is the daily go-to.
I also really like the quote - the 1st 1 from Alice & Wonderland, and,
then I saw the one from a band, as I was looking at COS(). And, that brought back distant memories.
Finding quotes to complement the text was a fun exercise.
Back in the early 80's - if people had an Apple or a PC computer in their homes (and it was very few) - I could in about 10 minutes write a small program that would spin a line around and essentially draw a circle. I used the Cartesian to Polar coord. systems conversion - using Sine & Cosine functions - to spin angles & gen X&Y coord's - and, people were always blown away when I would do that on there computer. Yeah - literally about 10 min. to create the program and have it running. It was cool, since it was early CG, and showed not only the power of a personal computer - but the power of math and a couple of simple math functions!
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