Penguin
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Acronym for Rapid Application Development. Usually means an IDE with a point-and-click tool for building graphical user interfaces.

There are at least two schools of thought regarding the usage of RAD tools.

One says that RAD tools are best used for rapid prototyping of an application, as they have high-quality form builders and allow fast development of complex interfaces. However, they are not quite good enough for final products, as the code bloat that comes with the abstraction that RAD provides is detrimental to the performance of the final product.

The second one says that they are perfectly fine to use for all tasks.

Regardless of which school you follow, you should always be aware that simply because a tool is abstracting away some of the complexities of the underlying language, it doesn't mean you can get away without knowing how things work. Sure, you can design SQL queries visually, and drop a database component onto a form and have it populate a grid of values: if you don't understand SQL or how database connections are made, chances are you'll have problems one day. Or you'll find you can't quite do what you want, or even that there are heaps of better ways of performing a query that you didn't even know existed.