This book is not meant to be the ultimate reference for access it did exactly for me what i expected. It got me started into the world of Access programming. It was long and did over explain a lot, but that was what i needed at the time. SO for me, it was perfect.

As a bonus, when i was in a rut and i needed an answer i found the authors Email address in the book and he helped to steer me in the right direction a couple of times. Now I have moved on to more technical books about the Access world, but i am very thankful for the groundwork this book helped me to lay down.

To teach an intermediate course on Access I had to read most of the Access books in the market. By far this is the best one as it takes the reader from the very basics to advanced programming in Visual Basic for Applications. Too bad that Mr. Viescas did not write the Access 2000 version.

Let me start by saying that I have bought and read no less than about 50 technical books in my lifetime and I have never written a review good or bad about any of them. With this one I feel like I have to write a review so that no one else makes the same mistake I made.

I have been in the computer field for over 10 years now and I recently decided that I want to learn Access. I am already quite familiar with most of the concepts and want to learn how to write a small Access program. I started with Access Step by Step and it was great. The next step in Microsoft's plan is to read this book.

What a completely terrible book. It is all over the place. It goes on and on about stupid stuff like using a keyboard and mouse and never, not once in all 1,000 pages, show you how to create forms to manipulate data. He says look at my bad examples on the cd but never once talks you through designing your own form. Terrible, terrible book!

The problem I see with this book is the author takes too much time explaining a thing, you can probably write the same content in half the number of pages (500) without losing any content.

I think this book does a pretty good job covering most questions. Its my primary Access reference and co-workers are constantly asking to borrow it. I don't know of a better Access book. I like the example databases. It lets you actually see what the author is describing in action. Its far too dull to read cover to cover, but its laid out well so you can turn to the section that answers your question and figure out what you need to do.