You are using Paradox 4.0 interactively for your department’s current data management needs. You and a clerk have been doing the data entry, report generation, and data management interactively. Now your department is expanding and your Paradox 4.0 database must accommodate new data and more data entry clerks, and the reports must be accessible from any of the department’s networked PCs. To manage this change, you could read through Borland’s foot-wide set of reference manuals; hope the company will send you far away for expensive training; or read this book. Using this book is an adequate choice.

Paradox 4.0 is a multiuser networkable relational database management system for IBM PCs. This book is not a manual but a teaching tool. It contains PAL program design concepts, guidelines on writing clear and efficient code, programming usage hints and suggestions, and several complete support programs. Although this book was not produced by Borland, it is meant to augment Borland’s reference manuals and is part of Borland’s official line of books. To use this book effectively, however, it is important to understand that “the underlying premise of this book is that you understand the workings of interactive Paradox.” Despite the author’s claim that no programming training is needed, some experience in using a block structured programming language is desirable.

The book is divided into three sections. The first introduces PAL by showing how to write and edit scripts and how to use procedures and procedure libraries. In addition, this section compares and contrasts Paradox 4.0 with Paradox 3.5. The second section goes into program control, manipulating the workspace, data entry, input and output, manipulating objects, system control, editor commands, and special functions. The last section contains the code and description of three development tools: File Viewer, WindowMaker, and WaitPlus 4.0. An index of commands and a conventional index appear at the end of the book.

The book is a well-constructed softbound volume and has good figures and high quality printing. Each chapter has a summary of what was covered, what was not, and why. The only shortcoming is that the programs and program fragments in the book must be keyed in. A valuable addition to this book would have been a disk containing the program text; less desirably, it could have been made available from one of the many repositories of computer-based information.