Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Access 2000 in 21 Days

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

It is not your desire to learn which takes you through the book, but sheer determination !

The book lacks a steady learning curve. It delivers the information in pieces which can be difficult to place in context. Which made me feel like reading a traditional text book, but without a lecturer and fellow students to support me.

There are several errors in the book. It is obviously based on the Beta version of Access 2000, which makes it more troublesome to locate the needed buttons and commands. The samples from the CD will not install automatically, you will have to copy them one by one and change the properties by removing the Read-Only attribute. The code you are asked to write, to gain hands-on experience, is filled with syntax errors. Therefore your examples will not work, which makes it very difficult to proceed to the next task.

After I have read the book, and in the process worked my way around the errors, I feel I have a very good picture of what Access 2000 is capable of, and in what direction I should go to accomplish my programming goals.

If you are new to Access 2000, and want to program a database (Private/Semi-professional level) your will be able to learn how from the book.

The book includes lots of information, but makes it difficult and tiresome to learn Access in 21 days. If only the publisher had a supporting website to list errors, it could have done so much better.

I am an intermediate Access developer who was looking for abook to fill in the gaps of my Access knowledge, such as how to createadvanced Reports and Queries. After all, the words are written on the title "... master Access 2000 in just 21 days". I will start off by saying this book shows that things are possible in Access, but does not go into explanation on how to do it. Throughout the book, this format is followed:

1. Here's a task for you to try

2. Follow these 20 steps, and don't worry, you don't need an explanation of any of these steps

3. Voila! You now have a working function/report.

4. Hope you learned something from this

I have heard many good recommendations of the 'Learn in 21 days series', and this being my first book of that series, I would not recommend this. In these 21 days, you will get something done, but not learning or understanding how and why along the way. Instead of 1 star, I give this book 2 stars since it raised my confidence level when I closed the book in frustration and attempted through trial and error to figure out the problem and eventually solved it. I summarize this book as a 780 page reference manual with 10 pages of quality content.

I bought this book as previous publications by SAM's have proved to be reasonably good but I was highly disappointed with this one. It would be acceptable if it were titled "Access 2000: An Overview" as it does have information that could be useful for absolute beginners. However, as it is severely lacking in depth, I think that it does not come anywhere living up to its title. I got less than 21 minutes worth of reading from the book.

Skip it or wait for the Second Edition.

Access 2000 in 21 days was clearly written by two authors without the necessary care in producing a seamless document. The change in style can be noticed from Day 10 up.

The first 9 chapters are fine, but from Day 10 perhaps too much was intended to be written in a puzzled manner. Not worth it!

For someone with a serious learning objective the book falls extremelly short. Chapters 16 to 20 are a waste of energy.

It is about time for authors and publishers to focus on real teaching instead of going after the big bucks!

Paul S. Ferraz, CEO - Dedicated Solutions Inc.

I usually buy the "Sams 21 days" books and am very satisfied with the overall content that they deliver. Usually...

This book on Access 2000 is not a good book. It skims on everything and nothing, the examples are not interesting and you don't learn from it. Unless you are really clueless on Access and want to have a very very general picture without knowing why it works, don't buy that book.

I will now stop buying Sams' book with my eyes closed. The fact that I had to buy another book (Alison Balter's, great book) angries me even more than the mere fact that I spent 25$ on the Sams' book.

1.This book was written using the beta software. So, often, the screen-shots are different from your display! Very confusing.

2.O gosh, the writers (publisher) seemed to have rushed through this book. Mr Cassel & Ms Palmer, give us book buyers a break! We buy with the intention to learn. Not to be left confused and disappointed.

3.Honestly, I don't think this book is worth the papers it is printed on. Worst, if you can imagine the many hours unfortunate buyers will have to suffer to try to extract whatever value there is from this book!

5. SAMS, please refrain from rushing out such books. One day, you will find that no one will buy your publications for their inferior quality.

Sigh! :>(

I had MS Access on my computers for 4 years and could not figure out what to do with this application or how to learn it without going to school.

Then I bought the Teach Yourself Access by Paul Cassel. With a disciplined routine of 5-6 hours perday and following the author's instructions line by line, I was able to design databases by the 10th day.

I think Paul Cassel needs to be complimented for writing a logical, simple and very useful book.

If in his latest edition he has eliminated some chapeters on Table design, then he should re-insert them.

The primary goal of this book must always remain to take a total novice who is interested in data base design and in 21 days turn him/her into a programmer who is very comfortable with using MS Access. Two years ago this book did that for me in half the number of days.

I thoroughly recommend this book to beginners.

Saeed Anwar

I have used other books in Sam's Teach Yourself series and was satisfied. This disappointing book is likely based on a beta version of the software. I spent a too much time in the software help section looking for ways to do the book's step-by-step examples. My recommendation is wait until they publish an updated and corrected edition.

Unfortunately, at this date, the number of "teach yourself" Access 2000 books is limited.

The files on the CD had the read-only attribute set. No big deal; just set the read/write property once it's on your hard drive. However, this indicates the overall problem with this book: very poor editing.

It's as if nobody sat down with this book and worked through the examples before the book went to publishing. Here's why.

1. The aforementioned read-only file problem. Poor editing. Somebody should've caught this.

2. He tells you to save your work with filenames already assigned to other files. If you save your work using his instructions, you write over the solutions to the problems. Not a big deal: just recopy them from the CD. But again, this indicates poor editing. Somebody should've caught this.

3. He gives instructions to perform actions, like generating a report. But the accompanying text is completely different from what you see on the screen. In other words, he has you do something, but from reading the text, what you're supposed to see on the screen, and what you actually see on the screen is completely different. Most of the time, I was able to get by. But there were places (like the Reports chapter) that the discrepancy was so large, that it was impossible to follow along with the text. I had to read through the chapter without following the instructions on the computer.

I have a suspicion that the authors changed parts some of the "follow along" instructions without changing the text that discussed the examples later on.

4. The authors are very fond of using the phrase "And we'll learn about X in the next section". However, it often happens that X was learned in the previous section. It's almost as if they restructured the chapters without making the changes to references where a topic will be learned. Not a big deal. It doesn't hurt your learning. It just indicates poor editing.

The list goes on and on.

I took a brief look at the SAMS Access 2003, which has the same lead author, and the reviews weren't good.

Here's the scoop. The book isn't awful. It has some good qualities. I like the guy's writing style. However, there are SO many books on Access in the market... there are SO many different books to choose from... there is absolutely NO reason to have to settle on a book with such lousy editing. If there were only one or two competing Access books, I'd even give this one a recommendation. The fact is, there are hundreds of books on the subject, and despite the fact that this book does have some good qualities, there's no reason to have to settle for such shoddy editing.

I was a little shocked to see the average review for this was a 2...

I am an aspiring database designer. One has to start somewhere, so I set off to learn Access. I had already tried the O'Reilly books (too much) and the Dummies books (too little). I found the Sam's book to be a good middle ground for someone who knows a little about computers, but mostly knows that they need to learn a lot more. The Sam's gives a good general overview about Access queries, forms and reports. It walks you through the program in a logical order, in a realistic length of time. It has a good introduction to Access SQL and VBA. It remains one of my primary resources for Access.

If there is a failing to the Sam's Access, it's that it needs more real world examples (it has some, but it could use more). For that, buy the O'Reilly Access Cookbook.