I first began attending the annual PowerBuilder conferences back in 1994 when PowerBuilder was a new and revolutionary development tool. TechWave 2003 will be my 10th annual PowerBuilder conference, which makes me feel a bit old. We still have the DataWindow and PowerScript, otherwise PowerBuilder doesn't look the same as it did 10 years ago. Though I often look forward to TechWave for big announcements, the future of PB is already well known because Dave Fish and John Strano described the plan in detail at the PowerBuilder Roadshow I attended a few months ago. I'm sure that same information will be conveyed at TechWave during the large morning gatherings as well as in PowerBuilder sessions. If you have any doubts as to where PowerBuilder is going, be sure to take advantage of this opportunity. Sybase has so much planned for PowerBuilder over the next few years that accomplishing those goals will be an amazing feat. One thing I love about TechWave is that Sybase provides workstations for hands-on demonstrations of their current betas and recent product releases. If you haven't downloaded and installed an evaluation version of PowerBuilder 9.0, you can come to the demonstration area and have your first hands-on opportunity. You can also get a look at Pocket PowerBuilder, which to the untrained eye looks exactly like PowerBuilder. Actually, even the trained eye may have some difficulty looking at the IDE and determining which is PowerBuilder and which is Pocket PowerBuilder. Pocket PB will certainly be the highlight of the conference. Yes, there will be plenty of attention given to the other products, but Pocket PowerBuilder is groundbreaking. They say history repeats itself, and we may see it happen this year. The quickly growing wave of mobile development is experiencing the entrance of an exciting new product just as we did back in 1993 when PowerBuilder became a leading force in Windows-based client/server development. I know Sybase is very excited about Pocket PowerBuilder, and I'm looking forward to feeling that excitement at TechWave. As you can see by the table of contents, this magazine is chock-full of Pocket PowerBuilder articles. What better way to kick off a great new product, than to bring thousands of people together at a conference and put this issue in their hands! Then to top it off, release a new Pocket PowerBuilder book (reviewed in last month's issue of PBDJ [Vol. 10, issue 7]) and two new PowerBuilder 9.0 books that provide the absolute best information and advice on both client/server, n-tier, and Web development! Of course, the PB9 books are the ones you've all been patiently waiting for all year and were edited by our very own Bruce Armstrong, Bill Green, Millard Brown, and me; and authored by the same, plus a dozen other experts you'll recognize. Rather than redocument the same information that can be found in the Sybase manuals, we wanted to provide advice and insight based on real-world experience. That's where the real value of these books lies. We highly recommend these three titles: