Access Forms & Reports For Dummies

Access 2003 All-in-One Desk Reference for Dummies

Databases

Access 2003 for Dummies

Format: Paperback
Author: John Kaufeld
ReleaseDate: 10 October, 2003
Publisher: For Dummies
Rating:

Why pay when you can get it free?
It starts out by assuming you know something about Access, or about databases, and only after a few chapters addresses the needs of beginners. This book is poorly designed and poorly presented. The author's style lacks conciseness and clarity, and at times reading this book seems to get in the way of learning. And then there are (yawn) the endless attempts at humor. A light approach to a technical subject can be fine, but when you have to wade through it to get to instructional material it's a little much. Microsoft has free on-line tutorials for Access 2003. After giving up on this book, I used them, liked them, and learned from them. And, they're FREE. .

A Good Fast Way to Get Started
Access is part of Microsoft's Office Suite. This is a quick and dirty guide to using Access to get information into and out of a database. It's designed for small, personal use database applications. This book fits that philosophy quite well. It uses the front end philosophy that Microsoft has done so well to enable a database to be designed, an input form to be created and an output report to be generated.

The list of things that this book (and to a lessor extent Access itself) doesn't do is long. There is very little theory on database design. There isn't much on SQL, the language of databases.

The idea here is to get a fairly simple, desktop you might call it, database up and being productive very quickly. And at this task the book does quite well. I also think that this is a good way to get started in learning about databases. If you subsequently find that your needs are more than you can get out of Access, you'll have a bit of background that makes the jump to a real database like Oracle, DB2, or SQL Server that much easier.

Very Helpful
. this book is very helpful for a class or if you are learning how to use this system.. i bought it for my boyfriend and he loves it!.