FileMaker Pro 5 for Windows & Macintosh (Visual QuickStart Guide)

In FileMaker Pro 5 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide, Nolan Hester holds forth on a fantastic database tool. Covering the Windows and Mac OS versions of FileMaker clearly and in equal measure, Hester shows you how to solve database problems large and small. He's particularly in depth on how to use FileMaker's networking features (which allow you to share a database among Windows and Mac users) and Web Companion (which you can use to run the back end of dynamic, searchable Web resources such as catalogs and directories). Scripting and templates get coverage too.

In case you haven't experienced the Visual QuickStart Guide presentation style, you're in for a treat. It's highly graphical, but the designers take care to present many tightly focused images, rather than lots of big full-screen pictures. The idea is that you can read along with Hester's procedures and see the steps illustrated nearby. If you're told to choose options in a dialog box, for example, a picture of the relevant box appears adjacent to the text. It's therefore easy to avoid getting lost. --David Wall

Topics covered: Using FileMaker Pro 5 for Windows and Mac OS, including entering data, searching, sorting, reporting, and printing. Database design gets coverage, including field types, validation, formulas, relational structures, and networking and Web integration.