1 comments about An Informix-4Gl Tutorial.

1. This so-called Tutorial book is not helpful at all. It is confusing and in many cases, makes no sense at all. It is a good thing it is out of print because it actually set me back in learning Informix rather than helped me. Mahler has his own method for programming Informix and it doesn't agree with the way I program. The title should read, "Mahler's Only Way To Program Informix--An Unapproachable Approach".

   When he covers a topic, you are always left with many more questions than you start with. In research, maybe this is a good thing, in programming, you don't have time to be wasting on his garbage.

   I did better with the vendors own publications which were highly wordy and overly descriptive, but at least, I got the answer I needed.

   If you want my recommendation, go look up Kathy Kipp's, "Programming Informix SQL/4GL A Step-by-Step Approach".

3 comments about Informix Stored Procedure Programming (Bk/Disk).

1. The latter half of the book is a copy of the SPL syntax from the Informix documentation. If you don't have access to a copy of the Syntax Documentation Volume 2 from Informix, this can be very useful data. However this only leaves about 90 pages of text to the book, probably not worth the $41 price. Overall I found the book to be fairly basic. There were no outright errors that I noted in the book, but it did not have the depth of discussion I was expecting. This is especially true if you compare it with books in similiar subject matter like O'Reilly's "Oracle PL/SQL Programming."



2. The chapters of this book are somewhat informative if you are new to Informix. HOWEVER the price of this book should be more like $15.00 since it only contains about 150 pages.



3. This book shows how to make, load, save and run the simplest of stored procedures. It does not give good reference to the Stored Procedure Language, program control statements, cursors in stored procedures, and statements that will not work in stored procedures that do work in ISQL/4GL. The book is also lacking in real-world examples.