Some useful information, but poorly presented and edited.

This book is intended for very novice programmers, and, at least in the first seven chapters I have managed to slog through, covers Visual Basic and only passingly covers how to program for Access. The presentation is poor, both due to the awkward and affected style (e.g. "Conditional code is the traffic cop of computer programs. Individual lines of code solve singular problems.") and completely indecipherable statements such as "A collection is a user-defined datatype. The users who defined the collection are the programmers who wrote Access." Parts of the book are very basic, such as the sections describing the parts of the computer -- the RAM, hard disk, bus, etc, and also has problems, such as "The electircal wire along which information travels is referred to as a bus. The microprocessor's address and data bus store the information of where data resides in memory." Confusing and inaccurate.

There are more blatant errors, such as the code example where the circumference of the circle is defined as pi*radius^2; this is actually the area. Also, a digression on an "aha" moment using Archimedes is wrong on the law of bouyancy, on Archimedes being "the father of geometry" and on Grady Booch originating the "aha" concept.

I don't recommend the book either for a begining programmer -- there are many other books that are better written and more accurate or for someone, like myself, looking for a text to teach how to program specifically using Access VBA. However, if any of you are insistent are getting the book, I'll be happy to sell you my copy.

Other Reviews

• Some useful information, but poorly presented and edited.
• This book is really great!
• It's OK