Rathi, Sudip & Everyone,
Congratulations in conceiving the book project for HMG. Your enthusiasm to push this project into a higher ground made me feels excited too and very much willing to participate too.
Since writing a book requires a lot of organized thinking and effort too. What if in the forum, a dedicated sticky topic for this can be created, or let say a place that we can discuss an outline and chapter outline of the proposed book. I think that would help to shorten the length of time in producing the firt draft of the manuscript.
I guessed since HMG and Harbour is constantly evolving, so before we reach the final draft of the book itself perhaps it maybe outdated. On it's electronic form, perhaps we can keep it at pace with the progress.
On the otherhand, I believed the best place to start this book is to where the Clipper drop off. From there we can effectively bridge the gap and lead the readers (those who are not members of this forum or Harbour forum, etc.) towards the transition process. So this can be a good subject for Introduction. An epilogue, to honor Mr. Roberto Lopez for his work as well as the Harbour Team.
Perhaps the first part of the book could cover the very Basic of Harbour itself including the compiler and linking process and description of Harbour as it is built by Harbour-project.org
The Second part is for HMG as built by the HMG Founder himself. Also perhaps as an introduction to MingW32 since this is the linker that we used to build HMG Apps.
Maybe the third part can be dedicated for Harbour API Calls.
Perhaps the last part will be the introduction to the variety of HMG Library that originates from the original HMG.
For quite sometime, I pondered with this thought, How an effective book can be written for HMG? Then I asked myself, what book do I want, then I realized I wanted a book that simply you can fall in love with...
Which mean any reader who come across with the book with or without knowledge would learn, those who knew would become and advanced user and those who have an advanced knowledge would become a master by reading the same book.
Contrary to what I have said above is that in which intended audience (level of knowledge of the programmer/reader/user) would the book be written for?
Anyway, I'm posting this message to express my support to your endeavor. All that I can say is whatever your lead will be is that I will follow...
Regards,
Danny