Sams' Teach Yourself SQL in 24 Hours
Review by David L. Simpson

Readers who are unfamiliar with the Sams' Teach Yourself in 24 Hours series may consider foregoing sleep, food, and bathroom amenities to learn a subject in a single day. Your humble reviewer does not recommend such an ascetic approach to learning SQL, particularly with Sams' Teach Yourself SQL in 24 Hours. The true intention of the series is to break the task of learning a technical subject down into easily approachable one-hour sessions. Fast learners with prior experience could breeze through most of the sessions in ten to twenty minutes each and tackle the book in six hours. However, a more realistic approach would be to take four sessions per day and spread them over six days. Those who are completely green to SQL and databases may prefer to take the sessions at a pace of one per day, thus spending a little under a month to learn the subject thoroughly. Whether a day, a week, a month, or something else entirely, you are welcome to define for yourself just what "24 hours" means. To Sams, however, it means "Let's sell some books."
    Ryan K. Stephens and Ronald R. Plew, the authors of the book in question, teach SQL at Indiana University and Purdue University, respectively, and run their own database consulting firm. They bring their seven years of experience with SQL to bear in this Teach Yourself book, and do an admirable job of covering the subject. Anyone who can push through all 24 sessions--taking the time to ponder the examples and work the exercises--will come away with a sound knowledge of SQL and database management.
    However, most students of SQL, whether beginners or not, will find this book ploddingly dull. While the authors cover their subject thoroughly and explain each topic sufficiently for beginners, they place the onus of generating interest in the subject completely upon the reader. Our authors gave no effort at all to feeling passionate about learning SQL. A driving passion for learning SQL is the only way I found it at all possible to push through this ponderous text. (Actually, I have to learn SQL for work, but "driving passion" sounds a lot nobler than "my boss told me to do it.")
    Hour One explains general database concepts for those who are new to the topic. The next five hours will help you build your database. Hour Four pathetically attempts to explain database normalization. This is the one point at which the authors fall down in their ability to explain a subject. I am familiar with normalization and I came away from this hour confused. Mr. Ryan and Mr. Stephens then move on to queries, and spend eleven hours on them, which is good. What else would one do with data but query it?
    The last seven hours cover users, security, views, the system catalog, miscellaneous "advanced" topics, extending SQL to the Internet, and various implementation-specific extensions of the SQL standard. Do not let Hour 23's title, "Extending SQL to the Enterprise, the Internet, and the Intranet," deceive you: this session is merely a cursory discussion. I believe the authors placed it in the book to round out their readers' awareness rather than show anyone how to accomplish such tasks (to which entire books have devoted themselves exclusively). Each session concludes with exercises, some of which are offensively simple, others of which can be subtle brainteasers, depending upon your level of expertise (don't worry, an appendix covers the answers). The exercises use the same generic small business example database throughout the book. This practice has the benefit of consistency, but the disadvantage of lacking variety. A little whimsy or humor in the examples could have gone a long way to providing a much-needed boost to reader interest.
    Being a habituated grammar cop, I must mention that Sams seems to have unleashed this book upon the world without the aid of an editor. Our authors saturate their writing with the passive voice, a practice which takes their book most of the way toward being a relentless celebration of boredom. Often in technical writing (where the identity of the person performing the action is irrelevant), passive voice is a necessary evil; however, passive voice is completely unnecessary in sentences such as "The computer industry was predominantly ruled by the mainframe computers." The authors also completely ignore the future tense. "In this hour you learn about database objects" would be insignificant by itself, but sentence after sentence from which somebody has repeatedly struck out the word "will" becomes annoying. One of my favorites combines both the passive voice and the future tense problems: "You see later how literal strings are used with database queries." On rare occasions, their sentences descend into the realm of utter grammatical nonsense: "The NULL keyword should be used in the associated column exists in the table [sic]." I beg your pardon? If you consider yourself a grammar cop, steer clear of this book: it will drive you batty. If such grammatical transgressions do not disturb the language center of your brain, you will likely do fine.
    Although this book in the Sams' Teach Yourself series will help you learn SQL, I can not recommend it to everyone in earnest. While the authors may be top-notch database consultants, and are probably good classroom SQL teachers, they have not shown off their abilities as writers with this book. Teach Yourself SQL in 24 Hours will help beginners more than an alphabetical SQL command reference because it presents the commands in a sequence more suited to learning than alphabetical order. Unfortunately, many students of SQL might find an alphabetical reference less plagued with grammatical problems and more interesting to read than Sams' SQL tutorial. Certainly, someone in pursuit of SQL tutorials could find titles that are worse than Sams' Teach Yourself SQL in 24 Hours, but with a little effort, one could quite likely find some to choose from that are far better. Undoubtedly, SQL is a dull subject, but it doesn't have to be this dull.

Sams' Teach Yourself SQL in 24 Hours
By Ryan K. Stephens and Ronald R. Plew
[$24.99, 450 pages]
Sams Publishing
ISBN 0-672-31245-X

Access 97 Programming Unleashed
Review by Tom Anderson

The Unleashed series of books typically contains thorough coverage of a subject, from installation to advanced topics, in a systematic and organized way. Access 97 Programming Unleashed, while holding a great deal of information, is organized in such a way as to make it difficult to build on your knowledge while progressing through the book. In a book that relies primarily on Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code to create programs, A Getting Started with Access 97 VBA example does not appear until page 311.
    Microsoft Access programming consists essentially of designing data tables, queries, forms, and reports, and then writing VBA code to accomplish the program's goals. Much of the VBA code will likely be included within the queries, forms and reports.
    The authors start out, though, with an overview that covers such issues as corporate development, Visual Source Safe (a Microsoft tool for multi-developer projects), the architecture of Access, and the Access runtime. Interspersed with this material is information on designing the database, but it's very general information that isn't fleshed out until later in the book.
    Ninety pages into the book the authors get down to table design, then go through queries, forms, reports, macros and (code) modules, in that order. Then comes a complete section on Access 97 wizards, including instructions on creating your own. All this material uses VBA code extensively, yet VBA code is not discussed until Part IV of the book. At that point, the authors revert to beginner language again, just when the hapless reader is feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of it all.
    Much of the material in the book is very good, but the book's organization makes it hard to use. And the book is aimed at those who already know a good deal about Access 97, even though the back cover claims it's for casual to expert users. Users who need more detailed guidance should see the next review.
    I would recommend the book only for those who have a good deal of experience with Access 97 already, and who are interested in moving on to programming. You should have used macros fairly extensively. Then start with the introductory material on VBA and move around to the topics that interest you. Don't try to go through the book from start to finish, you'll only frustrate yourself.

Access 97 Programming Unleashed
By Scott Billings, Joe Rhemann, et al.
[$49.99, 912 pages, with CD-ROM]
Sams Publishing, 1997
ISBN: 0-672-31049-X

Microsoft Access 97 Developer's Handbook
Review by Tom Anderson

Microsoft Access 97 Developer's Handbook is far better organized than the Unleashed book, and a lot friendlier to less experienced users. It's still not a book for beginners, because a lot of the basics aren't covered. There is a Dummies book on Access 97 programming, however.
    The authors begin with the basics of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), with examples of the basic code structures and elements. Then they show how to construct functions and procedures, pass values, and create an actual application. Error handling is covered early in the book, because the authors feel avoiding errors is too important to leave to the end of the book.
    After showing how to create a file backup application, the authors discuss application design and the elements of a user interface. Only then do they get into a discussion of forms and reports. The next section covers working with data, primarily with data access objects (DAO). This includes coverage of Access SQL (structured query language), which is a bit different from standard SQL.
    There's also good coverage of multiuser questions, security implementation, transaction processing, ActiveX controls, and accessing the Internet with Access.
    The CD includes all the sample code from the book, a utilities database that contains solutions from other developers, examples of DLLs, instructions for creating Windows Help files, and other helpful information.
    If you have some Access experience, you'll find this a very useful guide to expanding your abilities.

Microsoft Access 97 Developer's Handbook
By Timothy M. O'Brien, Steven J. Pogge, and Geoffrey E. White
[$39.99, 626 pages, with CD-ROM]
Microsoft Press, 1997
ISBN: 1-57231-358-7