Re: Alpha Five is driving me mad!!!
I am grateful for the suggestions already made.
As I said, I am reviewing Alpha Five 10 (having received the review copy with .NET magazine) with a view to recommending it to the organisation I am freelancing for. I now have a serious problem in recommending this software. A very large part of the reason for them looking at something like Alpha Five is in order to develop the in-house skill set of the organisation, so that they can manage their own database development with consultant support.
But in order to do this, there has to be a solid and comprehensive manual for both training and reference. FileMaker Pro 10 has two leading commercially produced manuals, of which The Missing Manual is in my view the better of the two.
The downloadable PDF by Susan Bush looks reasonably comprehensive, but only refers to the Desktop version of A5 10. Dr. Heller's book appears to be unfinished, from the comments above, but does not say so in the advertisement. I am therefore reluctant to spend money on downloading it, as I have already spent money on Bush's pdf.
The Wiki is not a training manual as such, but a reference for developers, and you have to know the fundamentals of Alpha Five before using it.
Given that one of the key selling points of Alpha Five is that it makes it easy to produce web database applications without having to know too much coding, the lack of a comprehensive manual is a serious issue in any kind of recommendation.
Originally posted by kkfin
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As I said, I am reviewing Alpha Five 10 (having received the review copy with .NET magazine) with a view to recommending it to the organisation I am freelancing for. I now have a serious problem in recommending this software. A very large part of the reason for them looking at something like Alpha Five is in order to develop the in-house skill set of the organisation, so that they can manage their own database development with consultant support.
But in order to do this, there has to be a solid and comprehensive manual for both training and reference. FileMaker Pro 10 has two leading commercially produced manuals, of which The Missing Manual is in my view the better of the two.
The downloadable PDF by Susan Bush looks reasonably comprehensive, but only refers to the Desktop version of A5 10. Dr. Heller's book appears to be unfinished, from the comments above, but does not say so in the advertisement. I am therefore reluctant to spend money on downloading it, as I have already spent money on Bush's pdf.
The Wiki is not a training manual as such, but a reference for developers, and you have to know the fundamentals of Alpha Five before using it.
Given that one of the key selling points of Alpha Five is that it makes it easy to produce web database applications without having to know too much coding, the lack of a comprehensive manual is a serious issue in any kind of recommendation.
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