This book is written for people completely new to ABL. ABL remains by far the most powerful and comprehensive language for developing serious business applications. Combined with the OpenEdge RDBMS™ database and the other components of the OpenEdge™ product family, ABL can support you in building and deploying your applications in ways that are matched by no other environment today. 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 ABL quickly, because the material might come at you fast and furious. Despite its many extraordinary and unique features, ABL is a programming language with most of the same constructs common to almost all such languages.
