Access 95 Unleashed

Rating:
Summary: Great idea gone bad
Review: The concept is a good one: enlist the support of multiple Access 95 experts, and ask each to write a chapter or two. Optimally, each author would be an expert in the section he or she composes, and the whole would be a single source for all Access 95 questions.The book falls flat on several counts. First, it would appear that the scope of each author's section was ill-defined. Sections that should have been complimentary clashed, and others overlapped significantly. I was left with the sense that those organizing the material gave few guidelines to the authors, and that the authors were completely unaware of the subjects covered in other sections. Some topics were covered again and again, while others were conspicuously avoided. In a book of this size and directed at an advanced audience, one should not expect to encounter so many declarations that a subject is beyond the scope of the book. Secondly, the book lacked a coherent style. While a reader expects that different authors will have different voices, some attempt should be made in a collection such as this one to organize the material into a coherent whole. I found the blatant stylistic differences between sections enromously distracting. Finally, the writing and editing were miserable. While a few authors managed to construct readable and even mildly entertaining sections, most displayed such poor writing skills that their work verged on completely unintelligible. The experience was in fact so maddening that I drafted a list of the authors who irked me most and all of the editors associated with the book so that I can be sure to avoid them in the future (a first for me). In short, the book was an enormous disappointment, and ranks comfortably among the worst computer books I have read. A wonderful idea, poorly organized and poorly written.