Microsoft Office Access 2007: The L Line, the Express Line to Learning

Well, it's a gentle introduction to database design. Microsoft has revved up its Access to this 2007 version. Hess explains it from scratch, writing for a reader who is a complete novice to databases. Most of the text is about how to use the graphical front end. If you look at a typical screen capture of Access given in many diagrams scattered thru the book, it can seem quite formidable. Tons of strange little icons. How can you ever master these? One step at a time. The narrative slowly walks through simple tasks. Initially, these involve making tables, then populating them and then making queries against them. Actually, many books on any type of database do exactly these steps. But Hess defers the traditional talk about the Boyce-Codd normal forms till the middle of the book. Likewise with defining referential integrity and the primary keys of a table. Eventually, you do encounter SQL statements, two thirds of the way thru the book. For a newbie, it's probably more important to actually do something with some simple tables first. Hess' approach is to give you some feel for the subject, and then worry about the theory of databases after this.