For whatever reason, the trend in computer book publishing these days is to produce a thick book (1000 or more pages would be great), double spaced, with large fonts and low information density. This book is not double spaced.Although the cover bills it as a "Special Edition", "Comprehensive", "Authoritative", I did not find this to be true. In general, it covers the topics I was interested in, but the coverage is shallow and uninstructive. Each chapter tends to skip around haphazardly, without much of a unifying goal.The examples are poorly thought out, and often confusing. They illustrate only the most basic ideas. Many of the things you might want to do in a real application - standard things - are not covered. I found the chapter on database access and bound controls particularly disappointing.The book would be OK for a beginner, if there weren't some better beginner's books out there.