Jan Harrington accomplishes her task neatly, to clearly explain relational database design. I was very pleased with how quickly I was able to grasp fundamental concepts and I would recommend this book to anyone getting started with databases. I had hoped that the book would be perfect and would clearly explain every relevant concept but that was not the case. When it came to the three interesting case studies that concluded the book, the author used concepts that were never explained - control-break layout, parent entities, ISAM file organization, repeating groups, reblocking files. While not understanding these concepts did not stop me from grasping the fundamentals of database design it was frustrating and made clear that this is an introductory text and not the last book to read on the subject. There were also about a dozen typos but these were disconcerting rather than misleading.