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Thanks, everyone, for suggestions regarding QT. I did find
a good book on QT in the computer section of a bookstore and spent quite some
time looking at it, the "hello world" exercise, and almost purchased it.
But I know from past experience that I am not going to make a lot of progress
teaching myself any form of C language. I am able to make some progress in
Basic dialects. I was doing very well with Liberty Basic, but it
just doesnt offer any easy or practical way to use SQL, other than some
cumbersome schemes to call the dll for SQLite, and the dll for MSAccess mdb jet
engine.
I should have made it clear that I am just a hobbyist teaching myself in my
spare time, for fun. Tony Caduto is worried that some employer is losing
money because I wont purchase Delphi. But thanks Tony, for your good advice. And
it IS good advice for someone with money and staff behind them to take that
advice and make something productive happen.
I just thought it would be worthwhile to share with Postgresql users how
much more difficult and less intuitive I found the MySQL download/install for
Windows to be compared to Postgresql Windows download/install.
I get the feeling that my best bet to make some progress teaching myself
something new is to stick with MS Access, and to connect to Postgresql through
ODBC. There are so many books available on Access and VBA, and I purchased
two of them.
I have a very old book on SQL called Lantimes SQL, and I think I will write
some sql scripts to run in PostgresSQL to define and load the test tables in the
back of that book. I have two books by Joe Celko on SQL as well, so if I just
concentrate on such books, I can gain some fluency in SQL.
It is just too bad that there is not a better, more user friendly, well
documented front-end tool for Postgresql in open source. It really is kind
of a marketing issue, in a way. I mean, if someone could really put together
some sort of "Postgresql for Dummies" series with something like Rekall
for a front end with some REAL LIFE examples or projects that ACTUALLY DO
SOMETHING USEFUL, rather than just paint a form to go
first/last/next/add/save.... if someone could put together something like THAT,
then, perhaps things would really take off. I dont know. Just a
thought. All the ingredients and raw materials are lying around just
waiting for someone to do that.
I guess MSAccess is fine, except expensive. Also, given the fact that M$
has pulled the rug out from under Visual Basic, one can never be too certain
what the future will be for something like MSAccess. Even the world of
Visual Foxpro has in some ways slowly eroded because of perennial rumors that
Microsoft will withdraw support for it.
Perhaps the stunning success of the Open Source community is fueled by the
ruthless and fickle nature of companies such as Microsoft. One would like
to build upon some foundation that is not going to disappear in a few
years. Realbasic looks like an attractive alternative to Visual Basic, but
then that is one lone company which is riding the Tusnami of the Windows
operating system (although I guess they are cross platform), but the point is,
whatever one chooses to learn, if it is tied to Windows, then its future is tied
to the whims of Microsoft.
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