This book helps you exploit Microsoft Visual FoxPro 6, a powerful end-user tool that allows you to build small-scale but effective database programs quickly and that ships with Visual Studio 6. The guide assumes little programming or database experience and provides a basic tour of programming and objects, plus database objects like tables and views. (Visual FoxPro 6 is arguably a good place to try out basic object-oriented programming techniques for the very first time.)Later sections examine how to build user interfaces with forms and controls. The samples aren't fancy, but this capable book gets you up and running with actual database applications. Important topics such as reports, distributing applications (using the Visual FoxPro run-time environment), and the FoxPro API are introduced. Other chapters explore ways to scale up FoxPro applications to SQL Server and Oracle and ways to access external DLLs.