RE: Web Front End Advice

It's nothing like that, Jon. Remember math class (calculus especially) when
the teache would teach you something for a week, then one day go "or, you
could do it like this.." The easy way! :)

That's because it made you actually understand what you are doing the hard
way, which makes the easy way even easier.

I've tought this subject a lot, not one person that read my books (or
articles covering the APIs) and then moved to a toolkit ever came back and
said "why'd you make me learn APIs first! Yuk!!!" In fact, it's just the
opposite. The say "thanks for showing me tough love... " lol!

And it's not because i make money on my books... anyone who's written a
book can agree to that (unless I don't know how to negotiate the deals..
lol)

Of course, we're not talking about those who actually have experience web
programming, understand standard input, output, etc... I have no problem
suggesting they jump right into a toolkit. But the average RPG programmer
wanting to learn CGI programming with RPG, I do. Maybe we just have
different audiences.

Bradley V. Stone
BVSTools - www.bvstools.com
eRPG SDK - www.erpgsdk.com

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Jon Paris
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 4:41 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Web Front End Advice



On 25-Feb-08, at 3:41 PM, Brad Stone wrote:

Having done RPG CGI for a few years now, and dealing with lots of
folks,
depending on your current skill level I wouldn't start with a
toolkit like
CGIDEV2 or eRPG SDK, but with raw APIs and learning HTML,
JavaScript, etc...

I'm with you on the Javascript and HTML Brad - but why one earth
force anyone to understand all the frustrating nastiness of the
underlying APIs? I gave up teaching the "raw" stuff because students
just found it so frustrating once they tried to go beyond the
provided examples. On the other hand with a kit like CGIDEV2 or your
eRPG you can study the underpinnings if you want but you don't have
to if you'd rather just get on with it.

I wouldn't force someone to learn assembler before learning an HLL -
I'm interested in why you see this differently.

Jon Paris

www.Partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com


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