In a msg on , Craig Pommer of 1:252/204{at}Fidonet writes:

 >> FirstStep 2.01 was $149 CDN plus a LD call to North Carolina 
 >> for the 1.7 meg corrective file.

 CP> Can you give me an idea of how good it is?  

You couldn't wallpaper a dachshund with the FirstStep hardcopy docs. So you
need to have lots of room for the .inf files and a nice big monitor to read
with.

It comes with Workframe (sort of like PWB if you remember Microsoft 7) and
the OS/2 2.1 programming Toolkit. Nmake is almost exactly like MSC/C++ 7. 
I don't use Workframe (never had a big enough project to warrant it yet).

When I started using Microsoft C/C++ 7 and then Visual C++ 1.0, there was a
big  shock after how simple Turbo C++ had been. But when I got over all the
command line options (learned to ignore them :), ANSI C was still ANSI C.
It's the same with FirstStep... but I count myself lucky to be acquainted
with Nmake. I don't even try C++ programming, so I can't help with that.

Here's the disk space IBM says you need:

Compiler and libraries:               8 megs
Debugger                              6 megs
Standard Class libs                   .5 meg
Collection class lib                  1 meg
Online information                    3 megs
Workframe support                     1 meg

The optimizer isn't as good as the full CSET product, there's no class
browser, no class libraries for PM programming, no execution trace
analyser, and you can't use DosCreateNmPipe to create pipes. Of course, the
absence of these things means they aren't taking up disk space.

It's about as useful to me as TC++ was under DOS. But I wish it had a
textmode debugger, because the PM debugger is painfully slow on my little
system.

There are 11.4 megs of files in my \ibmcpp directory and subs, and 6.2 megs
in my \toolkt21 directory and subs.

I'm pretty happy....but then again, I'm just writing little utilities for myself.

...awg
       
--- msgedsq/2 2.1