Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Access 2000 Programming in 24 Hours

An extremely good introduction

Honesty is always a good policy in my view, so I must be honest and declare a special interest here: I know Paul and I have worked with him. You may judge my objectivity in that light - in-depth personal knowledge or personal bias. I am a professional Technical Writer and a VBA programmer with many years of hands-on experience in both fields. I'm also a published author. I know that when I'm looking to learn something new, I don't rely on just one source of reference, and I don't expect to understand everything 100% of the time, or have just one book be all things to all readers. Sometimes though one can find a book that gives one a good basic grounding in the subject and at the same time also provides one with insights into better programming principles and practices. This book falls into that category. It is therefore a useful resource on both counts. The style is informal, almost conversational and the sentences are short to medium length, rather than complex and convoluted, paralleling the author's recommendation of breaking both problems and coded solutions down into smaller, more manageable chunks. Each hourly section comes with a quiz, which is always a useful way to self-test (if you cheat, you only cheat yourself - but even so you'll still learn something), and answers are provided in an appendix. In my professional opinion this is a must-have, not only for those wishing to teach themselves VBA/ACCESS but also for CS students looking for perspectives on what constitute better approaches to programming. If you're also new to the concept of Objects and Object-oriented programming (OOP) then this is as good a primer as I have seen.