Charles Ciesinski writes:

> Curtis Larsen writes asking for an 'IMAGE' for dummies.  The best
>  consolidated book is the
>  Image/3000 handbook.
>
>  My version is from 1984 and it's still good today.  It was written by
Robert
>  Green, Alfredo Rego, Fred
>  White, David Greer, and Dennis Heidner.  The book was published by WordWare
>  in Seattle, WA.

The IMAGE/3000 Handbook is still the best reference book available, but it
isn't "IMAGE for Dummies." Indeed, I'm not sure that a person new to IMAGE
would get that much out of it.

I personally learned IMAGE from the HP manuals. If you read the IMAGE manual,
from front to back, as if it were a novel and not as a command reference
guide, it's actually quite clear and laced with a few examples that recur
throughout the manual.

There are two aspects to IMAGE. One is understanding how it works. The
IMAGE/3000 handbook is absolutely superior for this first purpose. The second
is how to design an IMAGE database appropriately for the business task at
hand. To my knowledge, the documentation for this second aspect doesn't
readily exist, other than in the HP IMAGE manual and in the on-line tutorial
that I earlier referenced.

Designing IMAGE databases easily and well is not difficult. I have for some
time argued that an illustrated manual, stepping through several examples of
well-designed databases, would be of great value to the HP3000 community. If
the HP3000 is to truly succeed as a renaissance machine, people have to feel
comfortable designing new databases for new applications.

The most important advice still remains: (i) make your IMAGE databases very
precisely mimic the flow of information that would occur if all of that flow
were to take place on paper, and (ii) design the databases to efficientally
retrieve and answer the questions that are going to be most commonly asked of
the information stored in the database.

Otherwise, none of this is difficult or in any way magical. All a database is
is an electronic mimic of a steel file cabinet, filled with paper records --
and the most important thing that you must do in designing a database is fully
understand the business that the database is designed to serve.

Wirt Atmar