Hands on: Blasts from the past

Warning - book plug!
“Yes, that’s right, Michael, I do actually have a book coming out. Yes, now that you ask, I do have a copy with me to show the viewers…”

It’s like this, you see. A while ago I started to look back at the past columns and realised that there was a rich vein of material that might interest people - articles about databases in general, Access-specific questions and so on.

Of course, my immediate thought was: “How can I make money out of this?” and naturally my thoughts turned to a book. The easy solution was to publish the columns, as written, in chronological order; easy, but inefficient for the reader.

For a start, sometimes I publish a problem and solution, whereupon a reader writes in with a better solution. Yes, I admit it, I don’t claim to be smarter than the combined intellect of the entire readership of the column. So I publish the better solution a couple of months later. It seemed to make far more sense to bring those answers together.

The rewrite also allowed me to remove material that is no longer relevant and to bring all the sample databases (there are about 70 of them) up to date and to check that all the code and examples still work (a non-trivial task: some of the examples are in Access 1.0).

Finally, the rewrite meant that I could try to group similar information together. For example, there are multiple problems associated with dates, so all of these can go together, as can all the discussions about the relational model. The bad news is that it doesn’t work; there is too much overlap.

Should a solution that uses a complex query to solve a date problem be in the section on dates or complex queries? The answer, of course, is obvious - use a database as the index. Each article, section and problem is classified in several ways and the reader can either read the book in series or query the database to find the relevant bits. To give you a flavour, the headings so far are:

Access specific
Introductory
Intermediate
Programming
Database general
Introductory
Intermediate
Advanced
Date and Time
Sorting and Ordering
Mixed Bag

By the time you read this the snappily titled Essential Database Stuff - Collected Database columns from PCW should be nearly finished. If you are interested, check out: www.penguinsoft.co.uk for more details.
And to prove that questions from the past are still relevant…