Customer Reviews

Access 2000 Programming Weekend Crash Course

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I've spent a lot of money on training manuals that fell into one of two catagories: much to basic or way, way over my head. This book is neither. A beautiful step up from the 'Bible' series, Cary Prague once again opens doors in logical progression. I won't say it's a must read, Access 2000 Programming Weekend Crash Course is really a MUST EXPERIENCE.

I was very disappointed in this book! Within the Preface, Acknowledgements and the First Session alone there were miss-spelled and missing words, and references to applications that didn't work. Granted, it does say it that you must have Access 2000, but even with Access 2000 this book is more of a crash than a crash course. My recommendation.... look for information on Access 2000 elsewhere! You get what you pay for here.

Don't waste your time or money on this book. The authors should hang their heads in shame. This book WILL NOT teach you programming in 15 hours.

Even the CD-Rom that accompanies the books is a waste of time. The sample CheckWriter program didn't work correctly.

This book gives examples that are just right. It does not dumb down the language to third-grade reading, but it also is not so technical that only the Access program designers themselves can read it.

I highly reccomend this book to anyone who wishes to learn more of Access if they already understand both progrramming and Access basics.

I've found this book to be helpful in some ways, however when I initially installed the CD, the program didn't function right. I e-mailed their Tech Support, whose e-mail address is in the Readme file (to those who couldn't figure out what to do with the disk, the instructions are there too) and they linked me to a page with an updated version. This version works well, and it's nice to see what they did and where to make things happen. The book is easy to follow. It's alright. It seems like a good place to start.

This book is totally useless. It's more of a "I wrote a checkwriter program, you wanna see some of my code?" than a useful training manual. I understand a 15 hour book can't cover everything extensively but come on. It says it has 30 focused lessons. Well a focused lesson to me means the book says "go here and do this and now look at the results". I'm over a third way through the book and I'm still looking for something that says "Here is an exercise and let's do it". If you want a book where you can look at someone else's code get this one, but if you want a book that starts with the basics and helps you learn to apply the fundamentals don't waste your money. Oh well, back to the book store!!

I must say that I agree with the reviews from Ohio and Utah. It is so refreshing to see an easy to read format in a USEFUL computer book. It is easy to flip to examples of specific topics you might be working on, and the illustrations are very nice. And it's written by someone who is apparently one of the foremost experts on Access. To quote the Credits page in the book: "Cary Prague is an internationally known best-selling author and lecturer in the database industry. He is the president of Database Creations, Inc. the world's largest Microsoft Access add-on company." Check out DatabaseCreations.com for more samples of his company ... some pretty cool downloads.

I am a developer from California, and I swear I have no connection to Mr. Prague. I noticed his name on more and more books and realized that he is probably someone who know his stuff. I think he really hit a niche with the Weekend Crash Course series. It is so nice to have the subject broken in to quick reading chapters (20-30 minutes each). I personally did not finish the "crash course", but it's nice to know that I can pick it up any time and knock out a well organized chapter in half-an-hour. I would consider myself an advanced developer and I still found some useful tips in the book.

I was hoping this book would be what I was looking for. I already know Access basics but I don't really know much VBA programming. I was looking for a beginning VBA book, and I hoped this was it. I was wrong.

First of all, there is no way to do this book in 15 hours, so I resent the false advertising. But I could forgive that if the book took me step-by-step in some way that is understandable. It does no such thing.

I'll admit, the first 4 chapters were fine. They introduce VBA programming to the reader very nicely. But after that the programming examples jump to a height that was way beyond my understanding, becasue they don't explain simpler VBA programming concepts first. They just jump into relatively complex code examples and assume you can figure it out. No explaination. No "ok, now let's examine this code and see what's going on..."

And when the book gets to the chapter on DAO and ADO they really lost me, and yet the authors go on their merry way, somehow believing that the reader is having no trouble following them. Same with the chapter on bound forms vs unbound forms. I could understand the discussion, but they don't prepare you at all for the complex code that they display.

On the plus side, there is some good discussion. Not about code but about chosing between taking one approach over another. However, in the end that discussion is useless because you still can't figure out how to code in VBA.

I found this book fit my need quite well. I am a senior level Oracle DBA, have some VB experience (not much), good at Oracle developer 2000 (form and report), meaning I have solid database knowledge, skills, and programming skills. What I want is to quickly become good at Access application development for some small Access projects, and this book gives me just what I need.

I received my book and was so excited about reading up on programming in Access2000. I know a bit about about programming and I know Access2000 somewhat, however, this book jumps around too much. Their are NO instructions on setting up the CD-Rom, so your on your own their. When you finally figure out how to get the files off the CD they do not come up. You have to keep digging until you find the files shown in the dialog box at the top of the illustrations. The book never says what file to retrieve. Once you do find the files they do not match the book. The idea of a book like this is to TEACH me programming, not have me trying to figure out what the author is doing and debugging this book. Didn't learn much. In fact, I may return the book.