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From the Book: My Intent This is meant to be a hands-on book. The idea is to have you do various exercises so you become familiar with FileMaker Pro. The book doesn't have that much to do with theory, although you will learn some of that along the way. There are other books for theory, if that's something you care about. The FileMaker Pro manual shows you features. What I want to do is take you through a group of exercises that use those features. That way, when you're done, you've actually created some databases that you can use, and you'll know what it feels like. I want you to learn how to drive by getting behind the wheel. You can read the manual for the Rules of the Road. Writing this book has been a combination of excitement and frustration. The excitement comes from discovering a new way of describing some feature of this program in a way that has the potential to really make it understandable. The frustration comes from knowing that someday there will be a better way. Let's face it, indexes just aren't good enough, especially if you don't know the terminology. See if you recognize this: "How do I make the program do that thing I want it to do or that was called by another name in some other database I used to use " Another frustration is that I'll give you an overview of an area, only to tell you there's more in another chapter. Somehow, I want to inject it into you all at once, like in a vaccination but with less pain! There will come a day when you'll be able to just think about what you want to do, and it will be done. You probably won't even be near an object we now think of as a computer. You won't even have to know that what you want to do is accomplished with a database. That day can't possibly arrive soon enough for me! Until that day arrives . . . I recommend that you work at your computer with this book. I don't recommend that you read this lying down. The thing that will keep you awake is getting your hands in the program. Try to follow the steps exactly as given in the examples. You may have to do some of them over. There is so much detail, it may be hard to get the big picture. Each chapter was designed to be completed in about one hour. But you can't put this book under your pillow for three nights and get it. You may be struggling with the details of a layout or a calculation or a script and miss the overall concept that I'm trying to present to you. If you're anything like me, hearing the definition of a new term once is not enough to get the message to sink in. If you need to, go back and do a chapter over. In the end, it may take you 40 or 50 hours. But that's a lot less time than it took me to stumble around multiple books and magazines trying to get what's all in this one book. Not to say that I've covered everything. Far from it. But I've tried very hard to include as many of the little things that you will absolutely need to get started. If you've ever had difficulty finding the topic you needed from an index, you'll really enjoy the one in the back of this book. It has nearly 2,500 listings, making it closer to a concordance than an index. It includes terms used in other database systems to make it easier for users of those programs to find what they need faster. There is even an area in the index called Problems, which lists 70 areas for potential troubleshooting. Wish I'd had something like that when I started out! I know everyone is not going to start out at the same level. You may have had some FileMaker experience already. Although I want you to do the exercises, if you're further along, I don't want to force you to do the early exercises just to get the files. So I've included a set of files on the companion CD that go along with each of the book chapters starting with Chapter 4. You can take the files in the folder for the chapter where you want to begin doing the exercises and start following along with the text. If I had written an introductory book on FileMaker about five or six years ago, it would have been much shorter. But, as is the case with most software, the programmers are constantly trying to give us users more powerful tools. That means just listing the tools takes longer. And showing you how to use the tools takes Longer still. This book assumes you already have access to a copy of the manual. However, I understand that companies that purchase site licenses for multiple copies of FileMaker Pro only get one copy of the manual. Honestly, you don't need the manual to get most of what you need from this book. It's just that there is not enough time to cover everything in a tutorial like this. I know some people who find this type of reading exactly what they need to get over a bout with insomnia. I've come to understand that computers and FileMaker Pro in particular are just not for everybody. But if it's something you need to learn, I've done my absolute best to make it as easy as possible and keep it interesting. And in the end, if you should happen to come to love FileMaker as I have, you'll understand why I say, "Data never knew how beautiful it could be until it was touched by FileMaker Pro."