Product Description

This text not only gives you a firm grasp of REALbasic's essential concepts, but also tells you things you won't learn from the official documentation alone. If you've never programmed before, the book offers both a primer in REALbasic and an intuitive approach to the concepts of programming itself, as you quickly reach the ability to program every aspect of REALbasic. You start out drawing the interface much as you would do in a drawing program: by selecting buttons, menus, dialogue boxes, and the like from a tools menu. Then you use the code editor to fill in the code that tells these pieces what to do.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #450435 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 752 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Matt Neuberg's REALbasic: The Definitive Guide provides a patient and thorough introductory text for REALbasic 2.0 on the Macintosh, an object-oriented programming environment based on components and BASIC. Even if you've never programmed before, this title--combined with the power and ease of REALbasic--is all you need to start writing your own software for the Mac.

Besides a tutorial to the REALbasic tool itself, the author's introduction to object-oriented software is remarkable for its patience while getting the beginner to think in objects. (Besides an authority on Macintosh programming, Neuberg has a PhD in Ancient Greek. This book is perhaps unique in discussing objects while quoting Plato.) There is a full tour of REALbasic program statements, data types and the nuts-and-bolts of working with the environment and building basic programs.

The heart of this text covers the various controls and features available in REALbasic. The author covers simple and advanced user controls (like buttons, edit controls, menus and listboxes). Neuberg's tour here will let any reader design user interfaces and add event handlers to provide program functionality. Highlights include how to display images and do animation, sound and video within REALbasic. (Here, the author extends the already strong multimedia support in REALbasic with his own code for a simple video game.) For more-experienced users, there are how-to's on using files, databases and socket programming with TCP/IP and AppleScript.

In all, REALbasic: The Definitive Guide serves its purpose well as a one-volume reference and tutorial to getting the most out of this capable tool, whose functionality certainly rivals any of today's RAD-style programming environments. --Richard Dragan, Amazon.com

Topics covered: Overview of the REALbasic environment, BASIC language keywords, constructs and datatypes, arrays, objects, classes and instances, subclasses, events, menus, application architecture, building and debugging, window basics, system events, mouse processing, canvases and graphics, displaying images, basic controls, listboxes, progress bars, sliders, shapes, menus, tab panels, keyboard and mouse processing, files, databases, clipboard, drag-and-drop functionality, sound and MIDI, playing movies, game animations, printing, socket programming, Apple Events and AppleScript, and language extensions with XCMDs and plug-ins.

Major Kerry, AUSOM News, March 2002
When O'Reilly uses the words 'the definitive guide' in a book's title, readers can be assured that it is true to label...

From the Publisher
REALbasic is a programming language in the best Macintosh tradition: visual, intuitive, and easy to learn. It allows you to create interfaces in minutes and entire, compiled applications without having to learn a complicated language; the strong object orientation makes it very easy even for beginners to develop, maintain, and alter projects. Best of all, an REALbasic 3, a single button click generates your project as a Mac OS 8/9 application, a Mac OS X native ("Carbon") application, or a Windows executable. No other application framework lets you compile for users on so many platforms so quickly and easily.

REALbasic: The Definitive Guide not only gives you a firm grasp of the program's essential concepts, but also tells you things you won't learn from the official documentation alone. If you've never programmed before, the book offers both a primer in REALbasic and an intuitive approach to the concepts of programming itself, as you quickly reach the ability to program every aspect of REALbasic. You start out drawing the interface much as you would do in a drawing program: by selecting buttons, menus, dialog boxes, and the like from a tools menu. Then you use the code editor to fill in the code that tells these pieces what to do.

The widely hailed first edition of REALbasic: The Definitive Guide has been completely rewritten to encompass reader suggestions and the many improvements of REALbasic 3--like its ability to compile and run under OS X.

The book is divided into three sections:

Fundamentals: a detailed summary of the language that quickly shows you how to think about programming and accomplish your goals in less time

User Interface: how to create a complete application using the rich classes and pre-defined tools that make life so much easier for the REALbasic programmer.

Reaching Out: Internet communications, databases, multimedia, game programming and more!

Customer Reviews

Great but not for beginners
As RealBasic is an object oriented all-purpose programming language focused on beginners, it is not absurd thinking that books covering RealBasic should target on these people. However, The Definitive Guide goes one (or two) step forward and deeply explains everything you need to know about RealBasic from the experienced programmers point of view. Too little real life examples will illustrate the how-to, and therefore understanding the in-depth treatment of the information for those who want to learn how to develope programs for their beloved Macs is a hard duty.

Nevertheless, no matter what happens, this book is magnificent for those with programming experience, and specially those who have some basis on object oriented programming in other platforms.

The essential companion to REALbasic
Matt Neuberg has done a great job in making the use of REALbasic more understandable. The book is well thought out and written. The book covers not only the use of REALbasic, adding greatly to the official documentation that comes with REALbasic, but also covers areas like bugs and workarounds. Matt provides many code snippets and examples, some of which are available online. While not a book on general programming, it covers the general principles of OOP programming that underlie REALbasic. All in all a great book and indispensible and essential if you are writing programs using REALbasic.