Building Microsoft Access Applications (Bpg-Other)

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Books Showing Application Development
Review: Microsoft Access is of course a database. But it's really much more than that. With its front end forms design capability and the integral report generating system, it is well suited for quite a number of small applications. I say small, because you aren't going to use Access to handle the operations of a Fortune 500 company.

There are a lot of books that teach about the basics of Access. They however tend to talk strictly about how to do the programming portion only. They do not go into the practical aspects of database, forms, or report design.

This book takes you deeply into the design of four small and rather simple applications. This way you can see what is needed to actually make an application that is really useful. It is unlikely that you'd actually run one of these applications as is, even if they were applicable to your business, you or your boss would want something changed. But with the knowledge you would get from the rest of the book, this should be a doable task.

There is one combined plus and minus about this book. The plus, it has an excellent introduction to SQL programming, one of the best I've ever seen. The minus is that the SQL is based on the JET engine database. Access now ships with both JET and MSDE which is a much better engine. I suspect that Microsoft will make MSDE the standard engine in the future. Even with this negative, this is an excellent book.