🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <335@stech.UUCP> sysop@stech.UUCP (Jan Harrington) writes:
|The manual is relatively clear, or at
|least as clear as 4D manuals get.  Personally, I like the documentation, but
|I'm a programmer ...
|
|Because the program in so complex, the learning curve for
|productive use is very high.  There is a _lot_ of documentation, and you've
|got to wade through most of it to get a good picture of the package.  If
|you're not a programmer, you probably won't be happy with 4D (Guy Kawasaki 
|disagrees, but that's another story).  In other words, to tap the power behind
|4D, you've got to write code.                     

I have a copy of 4th Dimension, and I personally think the manuals are
atrocious.  There are four of them: a "Tutorial," which is nothing of the
sort, a "User's Guide," a "Programmer's Guide," and a "Command Reference."
The only one of the four that has a suitable title is the Command Reference.
The other three look more like somebody gathered the rest of the documentation
on the floor into three binders at random.  I am still trying to figure out
how to do the simplest two-table join, and I'm a programmer, too.  And then
the vocabulary is different from what you'll see in a course on relational
data bases; an attempt, I assume, to make the terms seem more "familiar"
but to me it comes off as just "different," which is always worse than sticking
with the original.  Nowhere in the index do you find the word "join," for
example.  You figure out after a long time that instead you use the word
"link."  And there aren't any "tables" but "files" instead.  And on and on.

Now, it appears that 4th Dimension is powerful, but I have a lot of other
things to do with my time and the documentation is so poor that I haven't
actually gotten to the point where I can put together the simplest data base
and know why it does the things it does.  Until the documentation is better,
I don't consider this a product a non-data base application developer can use.
--
Mike Klein		klein@Sun.COM
Sun Microsystems, Inc.	{ucbvax,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!sun!klein
Mountain View, CA