Alison Balter's Mastering Microsoft Access 2000 Development

By Alison Balter

Aimed at professional developers who wish to gain more experience within the Access environment, this title helps programmers customise their databases, in addition to linking them into other... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0672314843
• ISBN13: 9780672314841
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Sams
• Length: 1342 Pages
• Weight: 5.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.2" x 7.3" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The absolute best!

I'm a certified Access Developer and just read Alison's book cover to cover. I own 12 MS Access books and while I like Ken Getz' book for in-depth coverage of difficult topics, this book is by far my favorite. The flow of subject matter from one topic to the next is so smooth it's actually enjoyable to read. Concepts are layered perfectly throughout the entire book. This would be a great classroom instruction book even for those with little experience. I look forward to more books by my new favorite technical author.

Makes you life easier

To begin with "It is a really great book". I have bought several books on Access 97 and 2000. Alison's book is not intended for beginners who will not like it. But If you have a prior good experience in Access 2000, and start reading this book, you will never leave it. Alison starts with you on the ABCs of VBA and goes steadly and slowly deeper and deeper, she makes you know What is SQL, DAO ...etc. The language of the book is easy to understand. If you are trying to be a developer and intend to, read this book, practice and do hard work, you will never regret it.Advice: Do not jump chapters, read a chapter after another, read each and every line. Practice the examples more than twice, and most important of all, be patient and don't rush results.This book is great and necessary for each developer to be.

Unsurpassed

I am an MCP (Access and the Developer's Toolkit) who used the previous version of this book as my primary study source. Due to the success that I experienced with that book I decided to purchase the 2000 book. Allison is truly a remarkable author. She takes a fairly complicated subject (i.e. key differences between DAO and ADO) and explains it in a way that even a novice can understand. Like many other developers, I have a little library of books covering subjects such as VB, Visual InterDev, HTML 4.0, SQL Server 7. Out of all of those books (15 in all) this is my most valued reference. My only lament is that she has not published a more advanced Access 2000 book (although this gets fairly advanced in places).

An excellent reference to aspiring Access developers

This book is an excellent reference book for any aspiring Access developer for all levels of experience.The book has 5 main parts. Part I the Basics Of Access Development covers all the essential stuff but with enough depth to be of real use, eg Report events was particularly useful. It gives the right amount of attention to VBA, and objectively discusses the key differences between DAO and ADO. The focus is rightly with ADO for the rest of the book.After giving critical coverage to subjects such as debugging, error handling and optimising applications in Part II, the author deals with more advanced development, notably advanced programming techniques (which she neatly refers to as "black belt programming"), multiuser & enterprise applications, and excellent material on security and using Microsoft Office Developer to package and distribute applications.It's all there! A highly readable and highly recommended book.

Clear, readable, and well targeted.

The main strength of this book is Balter's ability to explain both the specific technical details of Access as well as the more philosophical principles that underlie the design decisions you have to make when you build a database. It's a very long book, which is often a sign of poorly chosen or organized information, but she does a good job both of selecting what to talk about, and presenting it clearly. Although I wouldn't say I couldn't put it down (as another reviewer here did) I do agree that it's a very well written book that is about as easy to read as any technical book dealing with a complex subject. To put it another way, if all tech books were written this well, my life would be a lot easier.