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Search in Book Reviews

The ACCU passes on review copies of computer books to its members for them to review. The result is a large, high quality collection of book reviews by programmers, for programmers. Currently there are 1949 reviews in the database and more every month.
Search is a simple string search in either book title or book author. The full text search is a search of the text of the review.
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Title:
Access VBA for the Absolute Beginner
Author:
Michael Vine
ISBN:
1-59200-039-8
Publisher:
Prima
Pages:
328pp + CD
Price:
£21-99
Reviewer:
Richard Knight
Subject:
basic
Appeared in:
17-1
This book is aimed at absolute beginners and those who have some experience of Access or indeed experienced programmers (who have not yet tried VBA) but is obviously for complete novices. The content is simple and seems to be a bare statement of facts, to the point where it almost appears like a set of classroom notes.

The book contains a CD-ROM containing all the code examples. However, in the latter half of the book several pages list the full code again, where he leaves the reader to read through and understand. The assumption being that he explained it beforehand therefore the beginner requires no more help. Every chapter sets some tasks, however the "answers" are missing. No explanation is given how to run code other than through On Click events, yet he devotes a chapter to debugging and explaining how to step though code.

Given that this is a book about using Access and VBA, it is disappointing that we are well over halfway through the book before he introduces data files. He introduces SQL yet fails to then explain how the user integrates it into VBA.

The book contains a CD-ROM containing all the code examples and a short Links section giving some potentially useful VBA programming sites for the reader to follow up.

This is not a bad book but it appears to be trying to cover too many bases. For a complete novice to Access and VBA it could be useful if backed up with some other help, I hesitate to say "Not Recommended" but do not think it warrants "Recommended" status. For his other two reader categories, I would have to say "Not recommended."