This book is written for two different kinds of audiences. The first group consists of existing Progress developers who might have created applications in earlier releases of the product, when many of the more recent extensions to the language were not yet available. If you are already experienced in the 4GL, you will find some of the material, especially in the first couple of chapters, familiar. Feel free to skim through those sections quickly, but you should not skip even the first chapters altogether to avoid missing anything-there are changes and enhancements to the language at every level.

The second audience for this book consists of people completely new to Progress. For those of you in this second group, you should take the time to learn enough about the language to understand some of the many ways it can help you in your development work. You probably need to have a background in some other programming language to catch on to Progress quickly, because the material might come at you fast and furious. Despite its many extraordinary and unique features, the Progress 4GL is basically a procedural programming language with most of the same constructs common to almost all such languages.