Helen said:

> I think you're not doing yourself any favours time-wise by not getting stuck into the technical ins ands out that you would find by reading your way through the various versions of release notes (which you should treat as cumulative). It is *the* place where these things are documented.

> Visit the Documentation Index section of the Firebird Website. Saves trawling and, worse, saves you picking up googled content that is just plain wrong.

Presently my focus is on assessing the usefulness of ADOdb as a data abstraction layer for Firebird, rather than knowing the innards of Firebird itself. Hopefully I won't need to know too much about Firebird at a production level, which some others will handle. I'm making my foray into a front end app using PHP, perhaps PHP-GTK as well, and want to make some kind of decision at the data level quickly. The quick and dirty method has helped me to have the software running, even if jury rigged, and to begin that process without getting mired into the set up details of Firebird. Apart from that, I do fully agree that properly reading the documentation is the right way to do it, especially at the production level. I am doing that with ADODb, PHP-GTK2 and the SQL flavor of Firebird - quite a bit on the plate already! : )

Thanks Lester, for the other tips. Will get rid of gds32.dll as advised!