Customer Reviews

Microsoft Access VBA Programming for the Absolute Beginner (For the Absolute Beginner (Series))

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

 

 

I am a self-taught Access user. I would rate myself as an intermediate-level developer. I picked up this book at the store on impulse. Even though it described itself as an "absolute beginner" book, I thumbed through it and thought that it might be helpful anyway.

I read through the book in about three days. The first thing that struck me was how poorly the book was written. Difficult to understand in many sections. I can't explain it but I am sure many readers of this book know what I mean.

The second, and more serious problem is that this book is absolutely not for beginners. I don't care how brilliant you think you are, this book will frustrate any absolute beginner. In fact, the book confused me, so I would suggest that it is fairly useless to anyone regardless of your skill level.

I own about 20 Access books (yes, it's getting bad). If you are a beginning Access programmer I can recommend the following excellent books:

Microsoft Access XX Visual Basic by Evan Callahan. That was my very first Access programming book and it will get you started. Easy to understand.

Next, look at Access 2XXX VBA Handbook by Novalis. I warn you that the first 4 or 5 chapters of this book are dry and useless for beginners, and you can skip over them (you will want to, believe me). But the book comes alive and lucid once Novalis gets to teaching VBA starting in chapter 7. Lots of great examples to follow. Lots of good code to learn from. Tons of practical tips and code covering the types of things you will be doing.

Finally, Learn To Program by John Smiley is probably the very best beginning book ever written. Unfortunately it is a book on Visual Basic, a programming language very close to Access VBA. However, since 90% of what's covered in the book applies to Access VBA, and since it's so clearly written for beginning programmers, I believe you will be glad you have it in your library.

I'm a SQL database programmer, not an application programmer, so I thought I could pick up Access VBA fairly quickly. Not so much, as it turns out. I started off with Alison Balter's Mastering Microsoft Access 2003 Development, which didn't give me enough basic grounding to really "get it". I succeeded in using some of the examples to my purposes, but couldn't do any truly innovative adaptions because I really didn't understand what I was doing.

So, time to find a more basic book to give me the grounding I needed. I bought Microsoft Access VBA Programming for the Absolute Beginner with that purpose in mind, and it has served that purpose admirably. Some of the writing is dense and difficult to follow, but he always follows up with examples that cleared up any confusion I had. I've had a great time working my way through the assignments and end-of-chapter challenges, and am feeling confident that after digesting the book fully, I'll be ready for Allison Balter's book.

So, in a sense, I was an absolute beginner and it has been a very good book for me. But I was an absolute beginner at VBA, not databases or usage modeling. I've been supporting enterprise systems for 15 years, much of which was spent writing reports and complex queries. That experience made the examples far more accessible to me, I'm sure.

I can't imagine how difficult this book would be for the complete computer novice or absolute beginner with zero experience in databases. I recommend a strong working knowledge of Access as an application before attempting programming with this book.

Hi, I bought this book, and it actually took a little over a month for me to receive it, since I thought it had been lost.

I was about to reorder when I saw the comments on amazon reviews and thought to myself, "I'm so glad I didn't get it. I won't reorder."

To keep the review to the point, the book is not for people who know nothing of access. You need to be familiar with some programming concepts.

I don't believe the title is misleading. In my opinion one should move to programming once one has an intermediate to advance understanding of access at its macro programming level, at least.

It's a great book. If you are beginning programming for access, buy it, but you won't reap the rewards unless you treat it like a school text book. Take the challenges and do them based on the code written for the sample database in each chapter.

I give it 5 stars, because unlike other books on VBA for beginners, this one has exercises and doesn't just throw out the code for you to figure out in the text and use for your purposes, which is fine, but you got not much to practice on.

The only way you will learn programming, just like math, is by doing it. I strongly recommend it if you already use in your MS Access database at least 30% of the available macros for your operations. It's time to move to VBA programming for greater speed, flexibility and what-not rewards of programming.

NOTE: VB (Visual Basic) is NOT VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). You have to buy books on VBA to program the code module interface in access. Of course more advanced programmers do use C modules and other languages as SQL in the interface. I just want to make clear that VB does not equal VBA.

I have mixed thoughts for this book since so far it has brought me through to learning VBA for Access. I would recommend this book for someone that is already an intermediate Access user that knows all about the Access objects(tables,forms,queries,reports...etc.) and how to create them without a wizard. In other words a person like me that went so far as building a few apps by just using the wizards and macros but needed to add some detailed logic to the next project. That is where VBA was needed for me and this book is great from that prospective. It has held my hand through VBA basics so far, I am almost done with the book now. The book is structured like a course workbook and not a reference manual. There is another catch though... this book is very specific to Access 2002 and not 2000. I was lost for a few pages when I took notice at the screen shots of the properties menus and seen them in Access 2002. I was fortunate enough to have had Access 2k and 2002 to see the difference so watch for that.

I also recommend "Mastering Access 2000 Development" by Alison Balter ISBN:0-672-31484-3 I just picked that one up and that one is fantastic and would go well after you get through this one. Over all I think that this book does do what it intends, to teach VBA basics but maybe it should be renamed to Microsoft Access VBA Programming for the Absolute VBA Beginner. An absolute beginner to Access would probably not know Access well enough to understand this level of book. I do recommend it as a good short course for begining VBA basics.

Microsoft Access is a database program. It has a powerful set of wizzards, forms, reports and the like that almost make any additional programming totally unnecessary. None the less, Microsoft has developed a special variation of their Visual Basic for Applications programming language that runs on Access and which can greatly extend the capabilities you get with Access.

The book starts off with a brief (33 page) introduction to Access including how to creat a table, define fields, and make a form. This is a quick introduction. If you know nothing about a database it's going to be a stretch to work your way through this chapter. If you're just a bit rusty on Access, this is a good quick introduction.

Then in the second chapter he gets down to programming. I find this chapter a little backwards. The first thing he does is talk about "The Event-Driven Paradigm." And he gives some code:

Private Sub Form_Click()
'write code in here to respond to the user clicking the form
End Sub

Wouldn't it be better to get the reader to writing some simple code, put in some code to be executed on a click and then explaining what he had just done. After this he just can't help from having to spend time describing the object model. Then he says, Don't worry about these details, we'll go into them later. After this, then the programming goes pretty well. I just didn't like this beginning. If you want to talk about objects which have properties, talk about them when you have them on the screen. Don't put in a few pages of stuff unreadable to the absolute beginner and then say don't worry about this stuff.

I rank the book very high, because of the way it teaches programming. I just didn't care for the missionary zeal that object oriented programmers have to present their religion first. For the absolute beginner this is writing to impress rather than express.

i have to agree with all who say this book is hard to understand and to use - there are some good exercises, although one does have to puzzle one's way through them - there are recipes of how many of which type of controls to use but one has to go back and forth to name the objects to fit the code. i do like that the user can replicate the code and learn some convention in the process. the text is hard to follow and to fathom in that it seems the explanations of some of the concepts is superficial and thus hard to understand the concept. the absolute most frustrating thing for me is that there are no "answers" for the challenges.. if one gets stuck there is nothing on which to rely for help.. it is very difficult to know which part of the code one is supposed to parrot and adapt where.. and why things don't work.. i find it easier this time around to deal with the book, now that i have worked on three fairly complex database designs but i am still getting confused, lost and frustrated..

This is a very difficult book to understand. It says it's for the absolute beginner! I've already had a Visual Basic class and could not understand this book. He gives code examples but never tells you how to implement it. You have to look at the picture and try to figure out that you need to add a text box or a label to the form before you have a place to write the code he shows you. It is very poorly written with no instruction or definitions of code lingo. I wish I could get my money back!

I have tried several books to help me with coding in Access and was never able to full grasp it. This book made the basics very easy to understand. I even found better ways to code in VBA through this book than I had learned from other people that we considered seasoned experts in VBA. I would suggest this book for anyone that has never programmed in VBA and those of you that have been thrown into a position at work that you have to design a DB or taking over someone else's project. A majority of the information can be used in prior version of access as well.

I bought this book because it was the only one that actually seemed to tell me where to start. I have LOTS of experience in programming with procedural languages but was bewildered by an environment where snippets of code are attached to one control but need to reference some other control. I found this book helpful because it began at the very beginning and worked through the basic concepts quickly. HOWEVER, I don't know that I can recommend the book. It is for the absolute beginner in sense that it goes into very little depth but someone with little programming experience probably will not get much out of it. Compounding the problem is the fact that there are a lot of errors. With my experience, I could tell when something was an error but it could be confusing to a newbie. This book has value for the experienced procedural programmer with little event-driven experience but even for that audience it could have been much better.

This book starts with a great explanation of how VBA is tied directly toward enhancing an Access database. Programming concepts build upon themselves in each chapter with an end of chapter exercise. The work is involved for those not exposed to programming and moderate for those with some object oriented programming experience. In the beginning a lot of discussion must be taken for granted with the 'I believe button' pressed often for the inexperienced. But this gray area is quickly cleared up toward the end when all the building blocks start fitting together. All end of chapter programming exercises relate toward some type of game to make the final key takeaways for a chapter fun and exciting.

There have been reports already made that it isn't for a beginner but be wary of these accusations! Programming at any degree requires an individual to understand discrete logic. If you're serious about learning VBA for access this is a great primer. It will lead toward a fundamental understanding of VBA allowing for more advanced programming books such as Access 2007 by WROX and Access Inside Out by Viescas to make more sense.