What Alison's book offers over other books in that she is able to take a highly technical topic and present it in a manner that is easy to comprehend. It is a book that the reader will often want to read from cover to cover, but it can also act as an excellent reference. Readers of this book will learn:

• Access 11 application development and real-world solutions to specific development and programming problems.

• Professional programming techniques backed by concise, no-nonsense explanations of the underlying theories.

• Debugging and troubleshooting methods to solve problems quickly and get stalled development projects back on track.

Many excellent books about Microsoft Office Software are available, so why write another one? In talking to the many students I meet in my travels around the country, I have heard one common complaint. Instead of the several great books available for the user community or the host of wonderful books available to expert Access developers, my students yearn for a book targeted toward the intermediate-to-advanced developer. They yearn for a book that starts at the beginning, ensures that they have no gaps in their knowledge, and takes them through some of the most advanced aspects of Access development. Along the way, they want to acquire volumes of practical code that they can easily port into their own applications. I wrote Alison Balter's Mastering Microsoft Office Access 2003 with those requests in mind.

This book begins by providing you with an introduction to Access development. It alerts you to the types of applications that you can develop in Access and introduces you to the components of an Access application. After you understand what an Access application is and when it is appropriate to develop one, you will explore the steps involved in building an actual Access application. The book covers several strategies before you build the first application component. This ensures that you, as the developer of the application, are aware of the design issues that might affect you in your particular environment.