Recommendation - book dedicated to forms

[got_access:]]

Hi all,
I would love to have a book written by a long-term Access Sys-Dev - specifically dedicated to building professional forms.

Over a period of time, I assume one settles on a specific subset of design models, which serve as tried and true for any database project.

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

 

[sonic8]

I would love to have a book written by a long-term Access Sys-Dev - specifically dedicated to building professional forms.

Well, to my knowledge there is no book explicitly dedicated to Access forms development.

There are lots of books on general Access development. I recently compiled my recommendations of books for beginning and advanced/intermediate Access developers. Of course, they do cover Access forms programming, but only in the context of providing a general overview of Access programming as a whole.

A really important topic that is insufficiently covered by every Access programming book I know is User Interface Design and User Interaction Design. Maybe that explains why many Access applications, including some of my own, are dearly lacking in that regard.

So, while there is, to my knowledge, no book covering this for Access in particular, there are books dedicated to UI-Design in general. My favourite on this topic is About Face - The Essentials of Interaction Design, written by Alan Cooper (et.al.), the “Father of Visual Basic”. I strongly recommend reading this book if you want to improve your form design and application behaviour. While it does not mention Microsoft Access at all, it is still possible to adapt the concepts covered in this book to your Access application.

 

[NauticalGent]

Great list, Sonic8 and I concur completely. The Inside and Out books have always been fantastic and Andrew Couch’s book on VBA, although advanced, has been a great investment.

 

[got_access:]]

Thanks Sonic8!

I've added "In/out" to my book wish-list - since it has a bunch on web-aps and I'm sure I'll have fun playing in that sand-box.

And the "About Face" book I'll get as a good book for my library.

BTW: Some of the MS Access templates are laid out nicely.
It would be nice if the developer who built those provided material on the objects.
I wonder if I could derive any info to use to reverse engineer them with the Access Database documenter?

 

[got_access:]]

Hi Pat,
Thanks - I didn't know about the web-aps being deprecated.

I started my post asking if there were any known books by Access Developers dedicated to building forms. The GUI aspect of Access.

 

[got_access:]]

Thank you very much for doing all that Pat!!

I have the Access 2016 Bible - great book!

Somehow I didn't see the "Building Forms & Reports" on Amazon.
But I think I might have been filtering for 2013/2016 books.

Thanks!
I'm going to get that book. :-]