any good refernce to learn progress

There's always the documentation ...

A few pointers of information and materials to get you going...

Training and eLearning

http://www.psdn.com/library/entry.jspa?externalID=4734&categoryID=1749

AutoEdge guided tour

http://www.psdn.com/library/entry.jspa?externalID=1697&categoryID=298

AutoEdge application example

http://www.psdn.com/library/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=298

OpenEdge Product Tour

http://www.psdn.com/library/entry.jspa?entryID=1131

Books:

- Product Documentation (as Thomas said): Getting Started documents, ABL Handbook

- OpenEdge books in Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=openedge&x=0&y=0

Other: Webinars and white papers on PSDN (e.g. OpenEdge Principles, and OERA)

Shafee

Thomas has good points; don't get overwhelmed though!

Have a look at the tours (OpenEdge Product and AutoEdge). They should give you a good idea of all what´s possible to do with OpenEdge, which is a lot! The source code of AutoEdge is available for everything shown there. Feel free to let us know what you think and how well you could follow (depending on your overall expertise and experience) and what you need to do, and we can guide you further.

Ah, and I forgot to say: Welcome to the Progress family!!

Salvador

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the PEG: www.peg.com

That's where I learned most of what I know about the ABL from when I was first getting started.

I have over 20 years programming experience and have worked on diverse systems. I started working in Progress about two years ago and that was also the first time I had heard about Progress/OpenEdge. I had spent over a month reading from here and there. After a month I started reading ABL handbook by John Sadd. In my opinion if you are a new comer to Progress then this book is a must read and should precede any other material. This is available online free of charge.

Is this the book you are recommending?

10.1C OpenEdge Development: ABL Handbook, by John Sadd

http://www.psdn.com/library/entry.jspa?externalID=4818&categoryID=1918

I see alot of good suggestions for books from which to learn Progress, but I don't know about you guys...but I've always learned best from trial and error. Does anyone know or does there even exist a compiler out there we newbies can download so we can start writing some code???

Try the OpenEdge evaluation kit available here:

http://www.psdn.com/library/entry.jspa?entryID=1131

It includes the IDE, all you need to do is to register and download.