Rating: 
Summary: An excellent conceptual guide to MS Access design
Review: A great book to quickly cover the fundamental concepts of Microsoft Access. Fills a need for those readers that already understand core programming concepts, and who don't have the time or money to wade through another bloated "HowTo" text.
Rating:
Summary: Great book for beginners
Review: All other books gives you a step-by-step approach to learning Access. What usually results is you creating a database in which you have no clue to the principles behind databases. Enter this book. You should read this book first before buying any other MS Access book. It explains the principles and idea of database design in a clear manner. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: When you've got the basics down turn here
Review: An excellent introduction to sound database design theory and how to execute it with Access. It gives you enough nuts and bolts so you can figure out what is going on but not so much it bloats the book unnecessarily. An excellent choice for the new database designer or old Access hand looking to take their skills to the next level.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent ! Written from a deeper perspective than most.
Review: Enough theory to help you take your database design and make it a good database design. Subjects I have been having trouble finding as a self-taught Access programmer. Tells you not just the "how to put a button on a form" but enough of design to make your application work well now and when you want to add to it. I recommend it to anyone who wants a quick, easy to read and understand, but not breezy introduction to relational database design, table normalization, and so on.
Rating:
Summary: Best introductory book on database design.
Review: Excellent intro book for anyone wanting to learn database design. Before I read this book, I knew that tables contain records, SQL was an English-like language used to query databases, databases contain tables, and cursors are something different in databases that main stream programming.After I read this book, I understood joins, rudimentry SQL, relational databases, and other concepts. Voltaire would be proud, Steven Roman writes in a concise, easy-to-follow style. A better explanation of 'normal forms' would have been nice, but I have yet to find any author who explains it better. This book is VERY well suited for a college course on databases. On the minus side, Steven Roman's treatment of DAO was weak. Part of the problem could be my C++ arogance, and part of the book is strictly VB.
Rating:
Summary: I'M A COLDFUSION GUY...KEEP THAT IN MIND:
Review: For a ColdFusion developer, to graph where your interests would probably be, it would look like an inverted bell curve: the beginning is splendid, the middle just wouldn't apply, and the end is worth coming back for.
The beginning of the book talks about stuff that we need to make sure we get down well, regardless of our database platform: Access, SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase - doesn't matter. The first couple of chapters
talk about stuff that is universally applicable, and under-appreciated:
* Normalization of tables, including first, second, and third normal form. As most experienced database designers know, you may not be able to glance at a database and know second from third, but you
should take the time to learn the principles of normalization.
* Referential integrity between parent and child tables
* Relationship types: one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many
* Join types: inner and outer
Up to about page 120, ColdFusion developers are all clear. About there, Chapter 7 gets into Access VBA specific problems about accessing and manipulating data, creating DAO connections, and how to
programmatically manipulate data using VBA. This is interesting stuff in and of itself, but probably not to a ColdFusion developer.
Picking up in Chapter 19, "Some Common Data Manipulation Problems," the party starts again, talking about complex select queries and joins.
From an Access standpoint, this book is chock full of goodies. From the point of view of a ColdFusion developer, I would say this much: if forced to choose between this book and the previous, the Cookbook, I would probably go Cookbook. But, as I mentioned in the previous review, if you work with both Access on the desktop and on the web, using ColdFusion, both of these are good, useful, handy references. Having a greater appreciation of what goes on behind the scenes in Access may help gain a greater appreciation for the larger picture.
Rating:
Summary: Great way to learn Access
Review: I am a VB programmer but I never used Acess before. I just picked up this book, and within 3 days I was building complex Access apps with SQL and all. The book skips all the BS and get straight to the point with what you need to know.
Rating:
Summary: DAO & quantum physics
Review: I find some of the complaints about this books to be interesting. First of all, I have always liked this book (refering to 2nd edition) for its concise simplicity (I wonder if the person who compares it to quantum physics has actually ever studied quantum physics?). And secondly I suspect that those who complained about dao do not realize that to use DAO one must first establish a reference to it in the vba window (Tools, References, check "Microsoft DAO x.xx Object Library). The program does not automatically provide reference to both dao and ado because of the overlap of objects in their respective libraries. Anyway, it is an excellent book.
Rating:
Summary: DAO & quantum physics
Review: I find some of the complaints about this books to be interesting. First of all, I have always liked this book (refering to 2nd edition) for its concise simplicity (I wonder if the person who compares it to quantum physics has actually ever studied quantum physics?). And secondly I suspect that those who complained about dao do not realize that to use DAO one must first establish a reference to it in the vba window (Tools, References, check "Microsoft DAO x.xx Object Library). The program does not automatically provide reference to both dao and ado because of the overlap of objects in their respective libraries. Anyway, it is an excellent book.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: I found this book very handy in learning more about designing databases in MS Access. Others in my office would agree as they have purchased their own copies after reading mine.
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