This book is an excellent resource for a novice user of Informix. I give this one 2 thumbs up. Even my expert coworker peeks into it once in a great while. My work place has the Informix books offered by the vendor which can be highly wordy and, for me, unreadable. Also, the book by Paul Mahler, "An Informix 4GL Tutorial" is pure crap. Or maybe the title should have been, "Mahler's Only Way To Do Informix--An Unapproachable approach".
I have used both the first and 2nd editions written by Cathy Kipp. The first edition used a smaller font, was easy to read and was more compact and, after using it as a beginner Informix programmer, I grew attached to it. When I started using the 2nd edition, it took me a while to get used to the larger font or the more spread out documentation. In other words, a command could be covered in a single page on the first edition making it easy to read, but it took 2 pages to cover the same command in the 2nd edition. However, the 2nd edition had more substance over all.
Warning to the buyer! The books page numbers in the index and the actual pages those references are located can be a couple pages off. AFter the index was written, a few more lines were added throughout the book. This screws with your ability to find an indexed item in the book. For example, the index says: Isolation Levels p.446 but the actual page is p.448,9. Although, the plus side is the index is very thorough and make finding needed commands easily (within a page or 2).
Drawback #2, as with most large paperbacks that are used on a daily basis, the book will start falling apart--pages unglueing out of the binder after a few months to a year.
But again, it has definitely been an excellent resource. I almost would give this one 4 stars except, compared to the couple other resources I have seen, this one beats all the rest. Even if it has its couple of flaws.
If you have any questions, I will be more than happy to respond.
