Alan Simpson (1) (1953–)

This book follows the plan established for books in the Sybex Up & Running series, namely, to show in exactly 20 steps what a product can do and how to use it. Books in the Up & Running series are designed to save the reader time and money. I'm not so sure about the time savings statement.

I compared the time it would take to follow the 20 steps in this book with the time it would take to follow the 24 steps in Sam's 10 Minute Guide to Q&A.

A clock symbol at the beginning of each step in the Sybex book shows the amount of time a reader can expect to spend in front of a computer to complete each step. I added them up and got a total of 735 minutes, almost 12 and a half hours or a little bit over one and a half 8-hour work days.

Each lesson in the Sam's book takes 10 minutes to complete for a total of 240 minutes, exactly 4 hours of clock time or half of an 8-hour work day.

Since both books promise their readers that they will become productive users of Q&A 4 by doing all of their lessons from beginning to end, then Sam's is far and away the faster method of learning Q&A 4.

The first two lessons in the Sybex book are devoted to installing Q&A 4 on your computer and to getting acquainted with basic terms and procedures.

The next eleven steps deal with the Q&A 4 database program: creating a form, adding records, updating records, sorting records, using Q&A's Intelligent Assistant, querying a database, making columnar reports, making cross-tab reports, modifying a form, customizing a form, and programming a form.

Steps 14-18 are devoted to the Q&A word processing program. In these five lessons, readers learn about writing letters, word processing techniques, macros, lookup tables, and key fields.

The final two steps deal with administrative matters: file management and file conversions.

Without doubt, I believe that a reader who follows these steps will be Up & Running Q&A 4 productively. But I also believe that a reader who follows the lessons in Sam's 10 Minute Guide will be able to start using Q&A 4 productively in one-third the time.… (altro)