Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Access 2000 Programming in 24 Hours (Teach Yourself -- Hours)

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

 

 

I was new to Access programming and was faced with some tasks at work, so I picked up this book and well, after a just a little time I was up and running. I highly recommend this title for anyone who is interested in programming Access 2000. A must have for beginners!

I have to be honest and declare a special interest here: I know and have worked with Paul Kimmel. Readers of this review may judge my objectivity in that light - in-depth personal knowledge or old boys network. I profess (and prefer) the former ;)

By trade I am not only a Technical Writer but also a VBA programmer with many years hands-on experience in both fields. I'm also a published author. I like to think that I know a good thing when I see one, and this book is definitely in that category.

Readers of this book will not only gain knowledge of VBA in ACCESS but also insights into better programming principles and practices. It is therefore a useful resource on two counts.

The style is informal, almost conversational (yes, I do remember the name of my second grade teacher - read the book!) and the sentences are short to medium length, rather than complex and convoluted (like mine!), paralleling the author's recommendation of breaking both problems and coded solutions down into smaller, more manageable chunks.

Each hourly section comes with a quiz, which is always a useful way to self-test (if you cheat, you really do only cheat yourself - but you'll still learn something), and answers are provided in an appendix.

In my professional opinion this is a must-have, not only for those wishing to teach themselves VBA/ACCESS but also for CS students looking for perspectives on what constitute better approaches to programming. If you're also new to the concept of Objects and Object-oriented programming (OOP) then this is as good a primer as I have seen.

This book is intended for very novice programmers, and, at least in the first seven chapters I have managed to slog through, covers Visual Basic and only passingly covers how to program for Access. The presentation is poor, both due to the awkward and affected style (e.g. "Conditional code is the traffic cop of computer programs. Individual lines of code solve singular problems.") and completely indecipherable statements such as "A collection is a user-defined datatype. The users who defined the collection are the programmers who wrote Access." Parts of the book are very basic, such as the sections describing the parts of the computer -- the RAM, hard disk, bus, etc, and also has problems, such as "The electircal wire along which information travels is referred to as a bus. The microprocessor's address and data bus store the information of where data resides in memory." Confusing and inaccurate.

There are more blatant errors, such as the code example where the circumference of the circle is defined as pi*radius^2; this is actually the area. Also, a digression on an "aha" moment using Archimedes is wrong on the law of bouyancy, on Archimedes being "the father of geometry" and on Grady Booch originating the "aha" concept.

I don't recommend the book either for a begining programmer -- there are many other books that are better written and more accurate or for someone, like myself, looking for a text to teach how to program specifically using Access VBA. However, if any of you are insistent are getting the book, I'll be happy to sell you my copy.

I'm an Excel Word VBA person and had some problems with this book. The projects didn't always work properly unless you set the right references in Tools, which shouldn't be necessary in internal programs. Most of the projects were about 60 lines of code, which is a general problem with programming books. They try to show you how to program by taking you on the Grand Prix the first day. In contrast, most Dummies book would show you a series of small procedures, about 15 lines of code, then piece them together towards the end of the book. That's the way to teach a new disciple. 'Here's how to do this. Here's how to do that. Here's how to put both together.' Most books (Especially Wrox) say, 'Here's how to do this and that and that and that and that. You don't have to understand all of it now, but well go through all 60 lines step by step and after doing 12 complex problems you should be able to figure some of it out.' Wrong.

I've been trying to learn programming now for about 7 years. Actually I started trying to learn exactly 20 years ago. I just never could figure it out. Now that I've worked through the first 10 chapters of this great book, I'm doing all sorts of things, I wrote an access basic double line word wrap module, as well as a module that interprets musical signs for input into MUP (a really great program...). I also wrote code to calculate totals for expenses in different categories and currencies as well as mileage calculation, which was impossible to do with the normal report tools. I've also written code for inputting a ms-directory listing (print to file) and outputting a file path and filename, which can then be imported and made into functional links. I've also written code to generate numbers (to print labels of consecutive numbers) and I wrote the code faster than I could have done it for example with excel. I highly recommend this book for anybody who wants to do programming and just can't seem to figure it out. Of course if you do have a knack for programming, you'll learn all sorts of neat tricks, I found this book very inspiring. And even then, I only have Access97, and was still able to adapt it (since it is written for Access2000) and the adapting was very little problem. I'm sure his new book for Access2002 will be just as good!

Still haven't got some of the examples to work even though I have gone blind picking thru the code to see why. This book taught me some things but I think it jumps ahead at teams leaving gaps.

I'm an Excel Word VBA person and had some problems with this book. The projects didn't always work properly unless you set the right references in Tools, which shouldn't be necessary in internal programs. Most of the projects were about 60 lines of code, which is a general problem with programming books. They try to show you how to program by taking you on the Grand Prix the first day. In contrast, most Dummies book would show you a series of small procedures, about 15 lines of code, then piece them together towards the end of the book. That's the way to teach a new disciple. 'Here's how to do this. Here's how to do that. Here's how to put both together.' Most books (Especially Wrox) say, 'Here's how to do this and that and that and that and that. You don't have to understand all of it now, but well go through all 60 lines step by step and after doing 12 complex problems you should be able to figure some of it out.' Wrong.

I am a senior developer and get to review many computer books that come to market. Even though I know Mr. Kimmel personally, I thought this is a very well throughout, well written book for beginner VBA/VB developers.