general

Microsoft Office Access 2003 Bible by Cary Prague, Michael Irwin and Jennifer Reardon is targeted at reader levels beginner to advanced. I consider myself on the high end of that spectrum with 8 years experience in Access & VB development plus many more years of dBASE and FoxBase/FoxPro experience. For its 1300+ pages it's fairly complete as a single-volume treatment of Access.

Since Access 2000, the most comprehensive treatments of Access have been via 2-book sets (two of my favorites are Alison Balter and Getz/Litwin/Gilbert). Book 1 addresses "desktop" issues (single user and a small number of networked users); Book 2 addresses "enterprise" issues. As of this time there are no 2-book sets published for Access 2003. I selected the 2003 Bible believing it was as good a single volume reference as is available to describe what's new in the 2003 version and on the balance it's OK.

For true novice users who haven't done any database work and/or have very little experience using Access, I'd recommend an entry level book - Access 2003 for Dummies, Access 2003 in 24 Hours, etc. before trying to tackle this book. Those with some experience should do OK with the book.

The first 900 pages address the standard "bread & butter" issues of Access highlighting the few items that are new or different. I was a little disappointed in the very brief treatment of ADO - more complete books sometimes devote several chapters; it's part of 1 chapter here. The following few chapters cover what's really new & different - much more robust handling of Web interfaces including Data Access Pages, XML and InfoPath, but in very little detail (only 16 pages for InfoPath which is the one totally new technology). The book is continues with a discussion of security which fairly thorough as is the following section on creating help systems. The Advanced Access Database Chapter covers more advanced queries and improving performance but nothing one wouldn't expect in a book of this scope.

The CD included with the book is good - the full text of the actual book in PDF format as well as selected chapters from other Office 2003 Bible books covering Word, Excel, etc. - it's nice to have these as a reference on my laptop so I don't actually have to lug the book(s) to a client's office. All the chapter exercises are there too.. Also included are several dozen demo programs, about half from Database Creations, Prague's company.

Cary Prague always writes the best Access books. This one on Access 2003 is no different...it really is the most comprehensive reference you could possibly hope for. Covers XML, ODBC, OLE, all of the data formats supported by Access 2003. The Access 2003 Bible helps find the best ways to avoid and eliminate errors and gives examples on many interesting ways to analyze your info.