Alison Balter's Mastering Microsoft Office Access 2003

Microsoft Access has the steepest learning curve of all the Microsoft Office applications. Its basic functions aren't really intuitive, and users typically need to do some programming as part of their first Access project. For those reasons, Access is the Office application for which Office users--even experienced, highly competent ones--tend to need help learning. Alison Balter's Mastering Microsoft Access 2003 is a new addition to the shelf of Access manuals, and it's one of the best. Balter does a great job of helping a novice Access user (someone who can open a database and edit fields, but can do little more) become an accomplished user. In other words, this book teaches Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming as it applies to Access. The word "Mastering" is appropriate in its title.

Balter's basic approach is to introduce a concept (say, the Implements keyword or ADO Database objects) and quickly explain its purpose with prose, then provide an example of how the concept works in practice. Which is to say, she provides a code sample. Because of this strategy, almost every page of this book has code on it. However, the author appears to have made a conscious effort to keep her code snippets short and easily comprehensible. Long, difficult-to-trace listings that span multiple pages are thankfully absent. Balter also does a good job of illustrating the Access development environment, including many screen shots of Access at work and of the applications that result from her code. This is a detailed, carefully considered book that will make sense to all but the most inexperienced Access users. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to write applications with Microsoft Access 2003. Noteworthy coverage deals with the Access way of handling object orientation, clever form-design strategies, and scores of techniques for performing various procedures on databases. Security coverage is good, too.