Tom Adams
tomadatn at bellsouth.net
Fri Mar 21 08:21:00 CST 2003
To the whizzes that write books in this list.
A recent post that said they learned better from examples than from reading books brought up a point I've been meaning to make. I
know the publishers push you to include all Access user levels in your books so more will sell. However that means that 80% of the
book is useless for moderate to advanced readers.
There are two points I'd like to point out (neither of which has a chance of making it).
1. Have a few overly documented examples if you will - but include a bunch of heavy duty
code for examples for the advanced programmers - with little or no comments. The documented
examples in books are usually too simple to be very useful. Real code will teach most
developers without the comments.
2. As there are millions of Excel and Access power users through developers - and sometimes they
will be doing other apps - eg. Excel to Access, Excel to VB, Access to VB and/or VB to Access,
Access to Sql Server and Sql Server to Jet - consider writing a From X to Y Dictionary. Eg.
From Access to VB, From Jet to Sql Server, etc.
I've moved into VB for the last 6 months and would have paid almost anything for an Access to Vb
book. Eg. Combo Box. What a pain in VB. Can't tell you how long this took me to figure out.
Makes me want to find one of the Access guys at Microsoft and give them my first born child (I
know, I know - she's a teenager and that's a punishment worse than death to inflict on anyone but
the thought is grateful.)
I find that I know exactly what I want to do in Access but the differences are often difficult to figure
out.