Application development books (OT?)

[Patrick <optomatic rogers com>]

Hi Everyone

I have received great advice from this list in the past.

My Son was diagnosed with Autism(he is getting much better now) and I
shelved a project I was working on for almost 2 years. I am still stuck
in the planning stage but I am ready to go forward again.

I want to avoid re-inventing the wheel and I would like to learn more
about the standard ways in which desktop Apps are put together. There
are many books on programming that give code oriented examples about
simple problems, for instance, how to connect to a DB or create a dialog
with a widget toolkit and there are design pattern books that discuss
paradigms in an abstract way but I am looking for something in the middle.

To be a little more specific, I assume that most applications would
follow the MVC pattern but surely for one application, a flat file would
be fine for the DB, while another App would require a proper relational
database such as sqlite or postgresql? Surely there are different
controller patterns within the MVC paradigm? Are there general folder
structures people use? How do people go about adding hooks to their
applications to allow for other languages to utilize them? etc. A book
that cited examples and strategies would really help.

Could anyone suggest something that would help me to plan an
application? I can manage with the specific pieces of code, It's the
general layout that I will probably fail with.

Thanks in advance-Patrick