Access Database Design and Programming

A great introductory text for Access users looking to become developers. If you're already programming with Access, you might want to find a more comprehensive volume.

Pros

Cons

O'Reilly is well known within the Unix and web development communities for publishing some of the best books on the market today. Their famous "In a Nutshell" series fills the bookshelves of many serious hackers (I own more than a few myself). Most of their publications feature no-nonsense descriptions of how to use complex technologies for those of us who don't like a lot of fluff.

Unfortunately, I must admit that when I cracked open Access Database Design & Programming, I was let down. This book set out to meet the needs of "anyone interested in learning Access in depth" but it left several gaping holes in an attempt to cover a vast amount of ground in a short (around 400 pages) book. You'll find brief discussions of general database design principles, the Structured Query Language, Database Architecture, Visual Basic for Applications, Data Access Objects and ActiveX Data Objects -- each of which could easily fill an entire book of this size.

In short, if you're anyone other than a database development newcomer, you're probably better off heading to the store and buying a few books that cover these topics in detail. If you're looking for a book to get you started on the path from database user to database developer and your organization only uses Microsoft Access, this is probably a worthwhile read.