Hi,

I also thought this was a bit hard on the Beginning VBA for Access book. While I agree that sometimes the "geo-political-economics" type explanations of why we are on MDAC2.6 or 2.7 or why ADO/OLEDB came along to replace ODBC etc are a bit daunting at first, I often skim them initially and come back later, and read them more thoroughly.

In fact once I have learned the actual "how to" of coding I often want to understand the bigger picture, especially when trying to figure out why something is not working as expected - and this might be a year after reading the "how-to" bits. A lot of getting s/w to work is about understanding which bits can connect to other bits (ASP to Access, VBA to Oracles etc) which is where all this stuff is important.

I find in learning s/w you have to kind of read around the subject from all kinds of sources to build up a picture of what is going on. I do not like the nuts and bolts only type books (e.g. learn it in 24 hours) as they tend not to help you get your bearings in s/w development time and space.

Beginning ASP3.0 and Beginning VBA for Access are 2 of my favourite technical books...