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Closed 10 years ago.
I am new to the world of MS Access. I have already worked on it for a few days now. What I have done mostly is to look for solutions on web, do some relevant research and get going.
I was wondering if anyone could share:
What is the best way of mastering MS Access?
Any suggestions?
Although it's not the method du jour in a web-based world, my recommendation is NOT to look on the web to try to learn a piece of software because you'll be getting a scattergun effect. You'll be getting a bit here, a bit there, some good techniques, some really poor techniques (and at your skill level no way to know the difference) but more importantly... you won't be getting the required CONTEXT to help you understand the various parts of the product and how they connect into a whole.
I would therefore get a decent introductory level textbook which will normally lead you through understanding basic concepts, building on each one so that you grow into the product as you go. I don't do much with Access any more so I can't recommend a specific book but have found that O'Reilly ( http://search.oreilly.com/?q=Access&x=0&y=0 ) has a range of good books in both paper and digital formats.
If you do want to learn from the web, I'd recommend a structured training program such as the ones offered by Lynda.com or Total Training. I've subscribed to both at various times and although I'm currently a Lynda member, TT's courses are usually quite good as well. There are probably some others but I can't give any first hand recommendations on those.
Good luck with your studies.
Related
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Closed 10 years ago.
By asking for the 'relative popularity' of different languages, rather than asking 'what is the best language?' or 'what is your favorite language', I hope to make this somewhat objective.
I want a language for machine learning / matrices, that is:
opensource-friendly (cf matlab)
fast for inner-loops (cf python,matlab)
fast for matrices (most languages are about the same, since they can usually use BLAS)
has terse, easy to read syntax (cf java)
I've currently settled on java, since it's average at everything, but really poor at nothing, but I can't help feeling that java feels more and more dated, eg no operator overloading, and the borked generics, so I'm wondering what the feeling on the relative popularity of different languages for machine learning is?
I think mostly people use C++, matlab and python, but just curious if there's some language that I've missed that everyone's busy using, that I didn't realize yet?
When I worked on a machine learning project with a friend, I picked up R, which is open source, designed for matrix math, and has extensive library support. It's certainly terser than Java, and I found the syntax pleasant, but that's a subjective judgement.
According to Rexer Analytics, R is the most popular data mining tool, being used by almost half of all of their survey respondents.
(Information on R is hard to search for, so they have a Google frontend for searching for information about it.)
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Closed 10 years ago.
I am seeking some more knowledge about MySQL queries. I've been working on building myself as a programmer and now I need to know more about MySQL advanced techniques.
I need to learn about MySQL JOIN queries, CASE, MAX..., everything that I don't already know.
I would really appreciate some links to useful articles with in-depth explanations of advanced MySQL. If you know any good video tutorial about learning MySQL, suggest it, I'm gonna purchase it.
Sorry if this question seems useless to any of you, but it's important to me since I can't keep asking SQL related questions here, I have to learn to do stuff myself.
Thanks.
Having picked up on a couple keywords (video tutorial, purchase), combined with your interest in building your skill set, I'd recommend looking into a subscription on http://www.lynda.com/
Depending on the programming language you're using in conjunction with MySQL, I'd also recommend looking into PDO (assuming you aren't already familiar with it).
Some helpful PDO articles, to supplement your existing knowledge of MySQL:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/php-database-access-are-you-doing-it-correctly/
http://www.phpro.org/tutorials/Introduction-to-PHP-PDO.html
http://returnsuccess.com/post/15-PDO-class-Object-Oriented-PHP
I'd be more helpful, but I can only provide as much information as the question itself.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I want to make really good websites.
Pet projects do really help in exploring blank spots and consciously mastering aspects you want to acquire.
I'm happy with the process and the result but what to do next with this product?
Users start to use it and I don't want to support them because I want to continue building my skills, not end user products. Hosting for all these web apps cost some money too.
Should I just code it till I find it interesting and technically challenging and then just junk it and move to another one? Or release everything as Open Source and don't care about support?
The reason why I don't want to do support is because I want to specialize. There is too wide topic already so I don't want to wide it even further.
I heard about the idea that you shouldn't care a lot about what you working on during your early years in development because pretty much everything will be junk. So just try more. Is it the way I should follow?
What is more effective?
You don't say how technical your websites will be - are you looking to build pure HTML, more dynamic DHTML or web applications with server scripts?
Regardless, you should look at taking on pet projects that challenge you in a variety of areas. As you get more experienced with web projects, you'll find that you end up doing many tasks over and over for different projects.
A good start would be to take on pet projects to tackle 'common' problems (layouts, styling, user logins/sessions, persisting data etc) and then look to abstract your work to a series of components that you can reuse in future projects. This way you will build up a library of reusable 'widgets' that means you don't have to scrap everything and start again each time.
As you get more experienced, set yourself tougher challenges, and before long you'll have a considerable arsenal of sample code, if architected well it will be mostly reusable, and at the same time you'll expand your experience.
Good luck!
I wouldn't say your early years are junk. Let's not think about the obvious intangible gains, like experience, insight, pattern recognition..etc....one tangible gain to think about is the development and organization of your own method libraries. My early years were in ASP so having my own set of includes was invaluable to my overall success and efficiency. I'd carry over a set of utilities and databasing methods that I had previously developed so new projects got easier and easier because the bare bones stuff had already been vetted.
It may not be important as it was 10 years ago because class libraries are getting so robust ...but you'll still find that as you develop new projects it'll be very useful to have utilities that you've already developed and organized into your very own class libraries.
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Closed 11 years ago.
In 5 days I'm going to ETL interview. It's my first interview on this subject. What question would I be asked? Most likely they will be about MS SQL Server Integration Service.
If possible, provide the answers. =)
If possible, provide the answers. =)
Keep it high-level if you have to, but don't ask a question that couldn't answer yourself.
I agree with Brad that syntax is not important, it's the thought process.
Another idea is to ask them about how they would pack up and move an office. It gives you insight into the same kinds of decisions needed in ETL (prep, actual moving of stuff, and validation), and you might be more comfortable talking about that than the details of SSIS
Think practically. Hand them a printout of a sample file that might need to be imported (possibly simplified to save time). Have them talk about database design, considerations, concerns, possible ways to improve the data. Then bring out a second printout of somehow related and see if they can figure how to validate the one from the other.
Make sure you talk about how much time is available to perform the ETL processes based on business rules and environment.
Require as much pseudo-code as you like, but I personally subscribe to the idea that syntax can be taught cheaply, but learning how to think is a very expensive thing to teach someone; and sometimes it's not even successful.
Also, ask them what standards they would implement if they were to design the optimum layout of the source data. Make sure you consider data distribution beyond your company (if applicable).
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Closed 10 years ago.
How much better would commercial OCR software be compared to the stuff that's available online for free?
More specifically: Reading text in pictures (things like book covers etc...)
I work with OCR quite a lot and can definitely vouch that the commercial offerings are much better than what you can find out there for free. Yes, you can make a free one 'work', but it will take a lot of effort for sub-optimal results.
I recommend finding a product that uses the ABBYY FineReader : It does a great job with little configuration.
You may want to consider whether you need to use an SDK provided by the OCR supplier or an end-user application. The SDK will provide position details, etc of what it finds and offer a lot more in-depth control, but will be more expensive. The end-user package will basically just read everything it finds, but you may be able to set it to automatic or control it rudimentally and it might be good enough for what you're trying to do, and may be a lot cheaper.
Get a trial version and give it a go!
Google's ocropus is free opensource and one of the best