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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A well-designed tool, not a tutorial or catch-all solution, February 2, 2001
This is an excellent resource...as long as you understand its scope and purpose. WHAT THE BOOK IS: It's accurately described on the front cover as "Tech Support at Your Fingertips". It very effectively uses a question and answer format, with many of the questions beginning with "How do I..." or "How can I..." The answers are to the point, but not sketchy. The book's sections and chapters are organized around the features of Access: forms, tables, queries, etc. So it's usually quite easy to locate your question and its corresponding answer. And the quality of the writing is consistently good. It might be true that all the very practical information contained in this book can also be found in the Access online help system that's included with Access software. But the book seems to be much better organized. That, combined with the paper format, make for a significant time-savings (and much less frustration). WHAT THE BOOK IS NOT: A step-by-step tutorial on learning to use Access - or (more importantly) a tutorial on database design. Knowledge of that latter topic is an absolutely essential pre-requisite to creating well-designed tables in Access (or any other relational database system). The authors are very good about *distinguishing* database design from using Access itself. Early in the book, they provide a one-page introduction to the topic, emphasize its importance, and recommend that the reader become familiar with the topic if he isn't already. On that latter topic, I highly recommend "Access Database Design and Programming", by Steven Roman (which covers Access 2000). It's an O'Reilly book (one of the better computer book publishers), and Roman does a terrific job of explaining database design *concepts*, then explaining their *implementation* in Access. However, Roman is intentionally light (or silent) on the subject of Access details such as forms and tables - so the two books complement each other exceedingly well. Once I started reading Roman's book, the Answers book no longer seemed confusingly devoid of context. Instead, it seemed focussed and to the point - because I began to approach it with the necessary background understanding. As a bonus, if you expect to do programming in Access using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), the second half of Roman's book will also come in handy. I fully expect that this "Answers" book and Roman's book, used in tandem, will be all I need to become a solid Access developer. At a later date, when I need to look into detailed fine points of Access usage and programming, I may acquire the highly acclaimed "Access 2000 Developer's Handbook, 2-Volume Set" by Litwin et al. I give the "Answers" book five stars. When its intended purpose is understood, it's a powerful reference tool.
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