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Access Hacks: Tips & Tools for Wrangling Your Data Review by Ilia Asafiev
Not bad, but one of the weaker ones
I've enjoyed several other Hacks titles - Excel and Word particularly. This one is not quite the same; it's like a combination of interface and SQL hacks. Granted, there are many useful tips and ideas for code - not always bulletproof as another user mentioned, but if you know what to do you'll be able to apply these ideas.
A lot of SQL-based hacks are self-evident to someone who has a solid SQL background; some interface features (such as user system tables, etc) are interesting ideas, but one might wish there were more of them. For instance, there are at least three examples of UNION statement in a query to concatenate SELECT statements... one would think this could be fitted into a single hack.
Most of the form hacks assume that bound forms are being used, so if you populate controls programmatically (DAO or ADO recordsets) much of this won't be applicable. Form design is an important topic, but very few control properties are covered. Multi-user section is pretty pointless - if you work with multi-user access applications, you probably already know most of this.
Certain hacks are duplicated; for instance, the one regarding "cleaner criteria" has basically two identical hacks back to back. Besides that and the UNION statement, there are a few other redundant hacks, retold by different authors.
On the bright side, there are several good ideas, or at least interesting ones that open some doors to making your own hacks. There are some user-interface ideas that are valuable (like the one that highlights the active control). All in all, I do read this book, but use only about 20-30% of it, of which a good deal I either knew already or could figure out on my own.