Author:Mark Collins
Publisher: Apress, 2011
Pages: 580
ISBN: 978-1430235781
Aimed at: Novice database designers rather than programmers
Rating: 3
Pros: Shows how to develop an application in Access 2010
Cons: Too specific in its examples,lacks explanations.
Reviewed by: Kay Ewbank

Shows how to build a complete application a chapter at a time - is this a successful approach?

Author:Mark Collins
Publisher: Apress, 2011
Pages: 580
ISBN: 978-1430235781
Aimed at: Novice database designers rather than programmers
Rating: 3
Pros: Shows how to develop an application in Access 2010
Cons: Too specific in its examples,lacks explanations.
Reviewed by: Kay Ewbank

On the basis of this, the book starts with defining the database schema, followed by creating queries, forms and reports. Most of this is 'when this screen appears, click on the Next button' type of stuff, and it's only at Chapter 7 that the material really starts to offer much more than you'd get following the Help files. There are then some useful chapters looking at adding code to do things beyond the basics. However, there is another drawback, in that I'm not sure who would benefit from the example code.

The publishers say that "Experienced Access users who want to begin developing code-based applications and project solutions in Access will also find this book useful." I'd say that's overstating the situation. There is quite a lot of code included in the examples, but it's very specific to the lending library application being developed, and there's little explanation of the techniques being used or even what's happening in the code. My feel at the end of reading the book was that the author was trying to cover too broad a topic; if someone needs to know how to design a form using the Access wizards, they're unlikely to be up to putting together their own code. If they are up to putting together their own code, the lack of explanations about what's going on in the code samples means they're not really going to learn much about Access VBA by copy typing the very specific examples. Finally, if you're an experienced programmer in another language, you'll be beyond what's being shown.

The book also has chapters on upsizing, distributing the application, publishing to the Web, integrating Outlook, using external data, and security. All are fine in their way, but either too simplistic or too general.

Overall, I think this would be a useful book to read to get an impression of what Access is capable of, and if you've used other database packages (or earlier versions of Access) and want to get a feel of Access 2010. It might also be useful if you want to put your own application together, and use the 'this is what to do next' ideas to give you some feel for how to go about it. It's of little or no use to programmers, though.