ABSOLUTELY GREAT!!!!
As an MBA and a novice programmer attempting to create a professional database application for work there is absolutely nothing better than this book! This book was extremely easy to follow and very well organized. It allows someone with little to no knowledge of VBA the ability to quickly learn and digest complex programming for extremely useful professional database applications. The author Mike (aka. The most helpful person ever) immediately responded to my emails when I had questions!!!! This is an awesome product and Mike provides excellent customer service!!!!
A Miracle for those in over their head!!!!
I am not a computer expert, in fact I was only good with excel less than a month ago. I could use excel to do everything... so I thought. Recently I have been on the job hunt and I found one that required "strong" Access skills. I have used access, maybe even made a few wizard approved databases. Let me make this clear, I had never done any VBA coding (maybe not even heard of the benefits or even understood it). After a while on this project I realized I was in over my head, and I wanted to walk out the door. My last hope was to find books to walk me through the process. I picked Access 2003 VBA because it Said the SMART METHOD... not because I knew anything about Mike Smart. I started working through some of the excercises, and found that Mike has a way of explaining the process very very to the point. He held my attention, and basically took the fear out of the programing and just brought me to what I needed to know to get my pay check. I had a few problems along the way. I was ready to run away again, and as a last resort I emailed Mike Smart himself. He responded to my question with in 24 hours. He has been working with me to correct the issues. I could not believe it. Here I am in all alone "pretending" to be a programmer and Mike Smart himself helps me out. I have bought many books to teach myself computer skills, but this one is the best. So if you are in a hurry like I was to learn what it takes to get your pay check you better BUY this book! Mike even told me that he is writting more books. So since that is the case, buy this book and email him or post it here what you would like to see him teach "us" about next. I would like a basic everything you need to know about computer repair, maintenance, and preventative maintenance book. I would also like to see a book on Microsoft Office intagration, how to intigrate everything with real world examples. This book is what you need to stand apart on a job hunt, to prepare a database, and just keep you and your company up to date with all the benefits of Access. You might as well learn Access, Microsoft charges us enough for it, and programmers get paid well. I hope he continues to write more books, because maybe just maybe with his help I can become a real programmer... not the pretender I am right now!!
Awesome Tutorial for Beginners VBA
This book makes the basics of VBA easy to learn. This book teaches thru examples. And the tutorial ends when the example database is complete, so you only learn tips and tricks specific to that example database. His method of name conventions, and database organization was great. That is what I appreciated most as a beginner to VBA. I new how to use Access very well, but it wasn't until I start with VBA that I realized how important the names and organization were. There were a few skipped procedures, or wrong referrences but they were closer to the back of the book are pertained to things already covered, so it was easy to assume what step had been missed. Great book!
Access 2003 with the Smart Method
Excellent Book. First time I ever saw such an excellent book. I wish I had similar books for other products.
Overall good with a few foibles
The layout, the sequence, and the reason I purchased the book was well worth the money. All of the items to keep in mind when creating an Access Application were well laid out and easy to read. I have just a couple of nit-picky things to comment on...
In the preface it mentions that the book was written in England, but uses American English Yet in a variety of places in the book, I would read "colour" instead of color, and yet it had the spelling "color" as well. There was another example of British spelling and American mix as well, but I can't recall it off-hand (I think "realised" / "realized"). I don't mind the British spelling, but it just should be consistent throughout the book.
Another nit-picky thing: Throughout the book concatenation was done like this: [DirectorLastName] & "," & [DirectorFirstName]. This will put the Last Name, comma, and First Name right next to each other like so: Brooks,Mel. It should have been [DirectorLastName] & ", " & [DirectorFirstName]. Then the director would have looked like so: Brooks, Mel. Yes, I know this is minor... but it is consistent :-)
One final rant, that is not so minor. The index is not well cross-referenced. Here's an example: there is a nice exercise about what to do when data entry does not match an item in the "one side of the relationship." This is known as a "NotInList" event. But the index does not show "NotInList" (maybe that is appropriate, since "NotInList" should not be in the index list, or something like that), but I found the index to be lacking in other cross-reference as well. I don't have the book with me right now, but I could find other examples of lackadaisical indexing.
Overall it has the information that I bought the book for (I'm an Access instructor), but I think it could have gone through a bit of polishing before publishing... therefore four stars, not five stars.
