Product Description

Targeted to advanced users at the professional level, this book covers the foundation skills required for more complex FileMaker systems. Areas such as relational theory, data modelling, security implementations, audit trails, recursive relationships, advanced portal tricks, and advanced scripting control techniques are covered in depth. Includes CD.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1789804 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-30
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 500 pages

About the Author
Chris Moyer and Bob Bowers

Customer Reviews

A book for database designers
This book has grown on me. I bought it hoping that it would help me to change over from Microsoft Access, with which I am familiar, to Filemaker. When it first arrived I thought I had made the wrong choice. More than a quarter of the book is devoted to explaining the relational model (which it does rather well) and trying to convince the reader that he/she should use this model when thinking about database design. I did not need such convincing - I have been living with the relational model for 20 years and can't think about databases any other way. Apparently there are people using FileMaker who are not familiar with this approach, and I can imagine that they get into some pretty pickles (the comp.databases.filemaker newsgroup bears this out).

But, as I discovered, this insistence on underlying theory gives the book a big advantage over others that are organised on a different basis. So many books about software are organised either around functionality (taking menu and toolbar items one by one and describing what they do) or around applications. If I want to know about functionality I can read the manual or help screens: if I want to read about 'my' applications I don't know where to turn because they are not the standard business applications that always get written about. So it is refreshing to find a book that starts from first principles.

Apart from relational design issues, the book includes a full and helpful discussion of audit and security issues, a chapter on reporting and a gem of a chapter on 'recursive data structures' (for example representing the situation where employee A reports to employee B, employee B reports to employee C ...). The final chapter, 'Complex Calculations' is an assorted collection of tips and tricks, some of them less obvious and more useful than others. Somehow it doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the book.

The only bit that I really don't care for is the attempt to bring in 'Extreme Programming', a style of programming which the authors admit does not easily fit Filemaker. This book does not even give enough information or insight into Extreme Programming methods to convince me that I need to buy the book which they recommend for further reading on the subject.

I would recommend this book to any database designer who is new to FileMaker but has worked with other database management systems; and to anyone who is already using FileMaker but needs to communicate with database designers from other backgrounds. But if you are looking for a recipe book for programmers, keep looking - this is not it.