Chris is worried about programmers and tools. Are there still programmers? What's the difference between a programmer and a developer? It's a semantic thing; to me it doesn't matter what the term is, it's what and how you do your job. In my life I've seen plenty of people to whom their job was just that, a job. They came in at 9, did their allotted programming, and left at 5, I've never been able to understand that mentally, to switch off like that. When you're in the flow time is an illusion (lunchtime double so). Even on bad days you want to get beyond the problem. I've always believed I'm a hacker, in the old sense of the word; someone who wants to learn, wants to know how things work, will spent time pulling things apart just for curiosity. Do I still consider myself a developer? Hmm, tricky question since I spent most of my time writing. How we view the audience of books depends upon the book. Professional level books hit the developer/hacker type people; those who want to learn and want to push themselves. They are experienced (generally) programmers. The beginner level is always difficult because your audience is much broader, from students to retirees. Some have no programming experience whatsoever, some have a little but not in the discipline of the book. When writing you put yourself into their position; despite the fact that you as a writer aren't the target audience, you've been where they are, so you can see from their point of view. In the past the tools have been poor for beginners. Everything was way more complex than it needed to be, with far too much having to be done by the user. With the current crop of tools, with their promised "70% less code" we have another problem. It's now even easier to code, which means it's easy for newbies to code badly, relying upon the tool to make good what you do. The assumption being that if you can "drag and drop" then it must be OK. It's a fairly natural assuption to make for someone not familiar with the technology. My view is that this methodology of designing is great to get you going, so you can see results quickly; it's a confidence booster that you can at least achieve something. What we, in writing books for beginners that demonstrate this easy technique, have to do is ensure that the reader understands this is a beginning and that it's not necessarily the best way to achieve results. All of us in this field who write and teach have a duty to make sure that people understand this dilema; yes use the tool, o stuff quickly, but understand it's not a panacea.