Some good information, but terrible reference
This book generally covers many topics well, but DO NOT use this as a reference for those tricky issues or poorly documented features. Often when programming with Access, you need to lookup specific features or functions that either are not covered in the online help or not generally known. Without fail, I never seem to find these sorts of topics covered in this book. If you are a beginner and want a general overview, then this book is fine. If you are a seasoned developer and need a reference book for Access programming, I would definately consider purchasing another book.
Excellent for a beginner
I mentor new VBA programmers and I have 4-6 VBA books in my library that I use for the code snippets. This book is the most useful by far for that task. The book has more code examples than any other book I have and the explainations are relatively complete. I have found a couple pieces of code that are incorrect or very poorly coded--but they are few and far between. The book covers a couple of things very well. DAO and ADO are covered in depth (these two chapters consume about 25% of the book) as well as providing good explainations of form and report events. This is a must have for the beginning programmer.
Learning procedural programming in Access
I am a clipperhead having to learn how to use access. My concern is to learn how to use access to do data conversion, manipulation, processing w/o much of the visual user interface. This applies to processing edi flat files, structuring collected data, ect. This isn't a visual book. Just good old procedural programming, stuff that clipper was great for.
The book does a good job of showing how to manipulate a database at the non-visual level. As I spend more time with it, I will do a follow up. For a programmer trying to figure out how to do the backend, non user interface programming of an application, it gives you a start.
Wes, Clipperhead since Summer 87
(3 reviews)
