Suppose you wanted to take up painting. You can learn about painting, basically, in one of two ways.
First, you can make a study of painting and spend a lot of time reading and thinking about colors,
lighting, and perspective. Eventually, you could make some simple sketches— maybe just some
geometrical shapes— and tentatively try to paint them. After a great deal of study and effort, you might
even be able to produce something you might be able to sell.
The second way is to buy a paint-by-number set. You've seen these, of course. You get a canvas with
all the areas of the painting already marked and numbered. All you have to do is fill in the areas with
paint from the little numbered tins, and you have a masterpiece.
Programming is a lot like painting. You can spend years training and planning and writing small
tentative programs. Or you can use wizards and example code; essentially, this is a
program -by-number. In this book, you'll find a hybrid a pproach that bridges these two philosophies.
Modern tools and the Internet have made it very easy for people to create programs without having a
real understanding of the details. This is especially true with graphical user interface builders that
automatically write all but the small details of your application. On the other hand, most of us need
professional results now . We don't want to spend years honing skills; instead, we need to produce
results today.
We wrote this book to provide you with plenty of cut-and-paste examples, and also to explain the
reasoning behind them. This lets you find a balance between your need to get things done and your
need to understand why and how things work.
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