The community of willing helpers around Firebird goes a long way back, to many years before the source code for its ancestor, InterBase® 6, was made open source. Collectively, the Firebird community does have all the answers! It even includes some people who have been involved with it since it was a design on a drawing board in a bathroom in Boston.

Using Firebird and the Firebird Reference Guide have been designed for easy use and access during your development work. A button at the top right-hand corner of each “content” page will cause Acrobat Reader to switch back and forth between the two volumes. Each content page also has a navigation bar with buttons to take you directly to the index listings for the selected character. All index listings are hyperlinked to their sources.

For greater detail about setting up your server and your network, refer to the early chapters of Using Firebird. Chapter 7 is a troubleshooting reference. The ensuing chapters deal in turn with design, language and development issues and provided detailed instructions for using the command-line tools.