I've only had this book a short time and have found more useful tips in this short book than in most of my other reference books. If you are proficient in Access, This is a must have!

I've enjoyed several other Hacks titles - Excel and Word particularly. This one is not quite the same; it's like a combination of interface and SQL hacks. Granted, there are many useful tips and ideas for code - not always bulletproof as another user mentioned, but if you know what to do you'll be able to apply these ideas.

A lot of SQL-based hacks are self-evident to someone who has a solid SQL background; some interface features (such as user system tables, etc) are interesting ideas, but one might wish there were more of them. For instance, there are at least three examples of UNION statement in a query to concatenate SELECT statements... one would think this could be fitted into a single hack.

Most of the form hacks assume that bound forms are being used, so if you populate controls programmatically (DAO or ADO recordsets) much of this won't be applicable. Form design is an important topic, but very few control properties are covered. Multi-user section is pretty pointless - if you work with multi-user access applications, you probably already know most of this.

Certain hacks are duplicated; for instance, the one regarding "cleaner criteria" has basically two identical hacks back to back. Besides that and the UNION statement, there are a few other redundant hacks, retold by different authors.

On the bright side, there are several good ideas, or at least interesting ones that open some doors to making your own hacks. There are some user-interface ideas that are valuable (like the one that highlights the active control). All in all, I do read this book, but use only about 20-30% of it, of which a good deal I either knew already or could figure out on my own.

I rate this two stars, rather than one, because it's likely that most people will find something in the book which will put them onto a new way of doing something.

Unfortunately, the book (which includes "hacks" from seven contributors, as well as the principal author) is wildly uneven in quality. The poor quality varies from the text (it is noted that hack #9 is not an "eloquent" way of handling the problem) to the solutions presented. For instance, the example code in hack #22 turns off warnings -- but then never turns them back on, which could be rather disastrous (not to mention that any code which sets warnings FALSE absolutely needs an error handling routine which ensures these are turned back on). Hack #74, rated medium hard, introduces domain aggregate functions (DSum, DLookup, etc.), but the example code doesn't protect against situations when nothing matches the Where criteria -- so the example code will blow up if the DSum function returns NULL and tries to assign that to the Single variable. Examples relying implicitly on unnormalized tables abound. Would it have been so hard to think up examples that actually used normalized tables? Hack #19, rated medium hard, provides code to move through an overly-long form relying on SendKeys (!) to simulate PageUp and PageDown key presses. Rather than insert page breaks on the form and buttons relying on SendKeys on maneuver between these, why not just transform the long form into tabs on a tab control?

The above is illustrative, rather than an exhaustive list of hacks that are trivial, dumb or even dangerous. While there certainly are some hacks in the book which gave me food for thought, problems like the above which I could detect in other hacks made me wonder what I'll find out the hard way as I try to actually use these new ideas.

If you're new to Access/VBA development, this book will be a good reference. If you've been developing Access apps for a few years, there's not much in here you haven't already figured out for yourself.

This is a fine set of 100 tips and tricks that will help you get the most out of Access. It's a good combination of simple tricks, and more advanced coding hacks. Involving everything for networks, to XML, to data crunching ideas. Even if you don't find exactly what you are looking for in terms of a solution you will benefit from seeing how the author approaches the problems.

Look through the table of contents, if you find ten or twenty that are in your areas of Access pain then