Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Office Access 2003 in 24 Hours

In just 24 sessions of one hour or less, the reader picks up all the skills needed to increase the effectiveness and reliability of Access applications. Using a straightforward, step-by-step approach, each lesson builds upon the previous one, allowing the reader to quickly learn the essentials of Access programming from the ground up. The book helps the reader to understand the fundamentals of the Access architecture, gain fast knowledge of the new features that Access offers, learn how to effectively use the latest tools and features of Access by following practical, real-world examples, and get expert tips from the best-selling author, Alison Balter. This book is designed for the way readers learn. They can go through each step-by-step chapter or just choose the lessons that interest them the most.

User review
teach yourself office access review
Purchased book to teach myself what office access could do for me and how to do it.

User review
Alison's a gifted teacher
I've personally known Alison for many years, and I've always thought of her as a gifted teacher. I recently bought this book to see what she's been up to lately, and was pleased to see how well she's covered a very difficult subject. From personal experience I can tell you it's very hard to explain database development. Microsoft Access is one of those subjects that initially seems so simple but quickly beomes quite difficult to learn. It seems as though you have to know everything before you can learn anything. The `24 Hours` book design really didn't permit Alison to go into lots of detail on every subject, but every topic she covers is done well. I'm very sure she carefully chose which topics to cover, and had to be selective in the amount of detail she provided. Really, given only 24 hours to learn Microsoft Access, no one should expect to learn all there is to know about such a complex topic. I highly recommend the 24 Hours book to anyone just starting with Access, or anyone who has a very limited time to get up to speed with this terrific database development system.
For those who need to go beyond the `24 Hours` book's coverage, I suggest you look at `Alison Balter's Mastering Microsoft Office Access 2003`. The Mastering book is a very complete reference to Access, and complements the 24 Hours book very well.

User review
Good Reference
I have used the `Teach Yourself` series to help me learn the basics of a number of Office products. This work by Alison Balter is one of the better offerings. In particular it gave a good explanation of some of the basics needed to develop a good solid database and sometimes difficult subjects like normalization. I will be using this book as part of a class I will teaching.

User review
Confusing for the Beginner
Having absolutely no experience with Access or database programs, I thought this book would give me a good basis to work from. Unfortunately, the book seems to assume that you have used a previous version of Access or that you understand the lingo related to databases. There is no glossary of terms, which would be helpful. The book also glosses over many areas with little explaination or detail.

User review
Excellent -- just what I was looking for
I had already been familiar with Alison Balter's books, having purchased one on an earlier version of Access. This book is similar in all the right ways -- extremely accessible (pardon the pun), no fluff, and tempered through years of working with both the programs AND the people who use them. When I am looking for books on database programming, I now look first to see if Alison Balter has written on the subject, having had to plough through some of the other books, from which I derived much less.