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Microsoft Access 2000 Bible
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Author: Cary N. Prague, Michael R. Irwin
List Price: $49.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0764532863
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (07 May, 1999)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 3,013
Average Customer Rating: 3.15 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 2 out of 5
No structure at all
There's something strange about this Bible series. I already bought quite a few books of this series. They are very attractive by their looks, usually very thick and most of the time a bit disappointing. This one really is. I have rarely seen a computer book that is so badly structured as this one, I really do not find my way in it. Not the book to choose if you want to learn access, not even good as a reference book, no structure, no depth. I really wonder why it is so successful...
Rating: 2 out of 5
Uninspired
I'm not very impressed with this book. This was my first Access book and it seemed like a good book at the time. When I started using this in conjunction with my own database development, I found it lacking.It comes with a pet shop database and all of the examples and discussion center around that. Which I suppose seems to make sense. However, that construct is easy for the authors to create, yet gives us readers an extra "layer" to unravel before we can adapt a concept to our own work. Time and time again I have reached a point in my database development where I needed to figure out how to do something. For example, right now I want to read up on splitting a database. So I flipped to that section, however there is NOTHING in the section that I can find useful. In particular, I want to know how to manage linked tables. So let's say I split a database, and put a database into production for a client. Further let's say that I add a form or report to the front end later and email the changed front end to the client. How do I handle that scenario? This book convers no such "real-world" actions, which is one reason why this book lacks, in my opinion. In addition, the forms and reports that exist in the database are incredibly uninspired and simplistic. For example, check out Figure 19-7 (Chapter 19). It looks like something a child would put together. Or take a look at Figure 16-16, which is a terrible GUI. While reading though this, I felt uninspired. This book verbosely describes concepts that are better explained with real-life examples. It seems more focused on a "widget" rather than something I can relate to. The database looks "cartooney" and unbelievable, constantly requiring me to translate the juvenile examples to something meaningful. The list goes on and on. As an alternative, I would consider Access 2000 - The Complete Reference by Osborne Press (Author: Virginia Anderson). It is a much better reference (I need an answer quick), as well as a "reader" (Read the chapter on using Forms and pleasantly stumble across the sequence of Form_Events that Access exposes).
Rating: 4 out of 5
Good for Newbies, Good reference for old hands
Great for learning the basics of relational database design and the basic access object design and interaction. It is well written and the layout makes it an excellent reference book. If you are looking for a book that will help you to create a workable application from little or no knowledge of databases this is the best that I've seen.
The sections on ADO and VBA however do not contain enogh info on the basic Architecture of Access and Objects to make it useful to the beginner and are too sketchy to be of any real use to advance users or developers.
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