This User Guide describes FreeTDS™ 1.4. It is the product of (lots of) happy collaborative effort. Although Brian's name and mine are at the top of it, behind it are many others, who contributed thoughtful suggestions, bamboozled questions, stellar prose, and terse instructions. I don't mention this for the usual reasons (the enumeration of which I leave to you) but rather to emphasize that the purpose of our effort is to help you and those who come after you to have the easiest and most enjoyable time with FreeTDS™.

It is surprisingly hard, after a while, to remember how it can be for someone newly approaching a project to use it. What seems as obvious as a fog horn to an old hand may be much more like the fog itself to the newcomer. That can make installing and setting up new software a puzzling or frustrating experience. You may have heard, “It's easy if you know how.” Indeed it is, and that's our purpose here: to make it easy, by letting you know how.

This guide is here for you, and we hope that you will be here for it, that others might benefit from your experience or inexperience. The most recent version ^[1] can be found on the FreeTDS™ web site, where you will also find the most up to date FAQ, as well as links to the anonymous and browseable git repository. If you find something wrong, unclear, badly put, misleading, or incorrigible, I hope you will let us know. Post your musings or rants to the mailing list (see Helping). Patches to doc/userguide.xml are especially welcome, of course. By taking the time let us know what you think, perhaps the path to enlightenment will be made a little smoother for the fellow behind you.

A few technical notes. This guide is written in XML DocBook format, specifications for which are found in the DocBook book. It was converted to HTML with xmlto. The XML text is distributed with the rest of the source code, and may be edited with your favorite or least favorite text editor.

Enough. Let's begin.

--jkl