Coming to this book I only knew Novalis as a master of poetry, not as a novelist. And now I know why. The novel centers on Henry, a budding scholar and would-be poet who has had a vision. In this vision he sees a blue flower, and in its shape, the image of an unknown woman and he feels he must discover her identity. As he travels to Augsburg in the company of some merchants and his mother, he encounters many interesting personalities before he comes face to face with his dream. This book suffers mostly because of the eighteenth century tradition of digression. For instance, in one scene where Henry meets with an older poet and asks him to tell him a fairy tale, the tale itself eats up 20 pages of this novel. The tales that surround the main novel are thin, transparent, and lifeless. And what is left of the book is either taken up by philosophical or merely descriptive prose. While I highly recommend reading the authors "Hymns to the Night" this book is boring at best and awful at worst.

This is one of my favorite Romantic novels. It is filled with amazing imagery, fairy tales and myths mutated into new forms, and a powerful dialectic. Sadly, the novel was never finished by Novalis, but it is definitely worth the read anyway. Much of this book is based on Novalis' (Friedrich von Hardenberg) own life. If you would like to read another great novel that deals with Novalis' life, look at Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower.

I had been looking for this book for awhile and I finally found it here. It is full of amazing imagery. This copy is in English in case the discription is unclear.

This book has frustrated me to no end. It jumps from subject to subject with no warning. For example the book explains a little bit of the architecture, then says that an "Access Project" has a different architecture. I thought I was working on an Access Project, oops, much later that I discovered that, an Access Application is not the same thing as an Access Project. Thanks for telling me. And for a good portion of the book, there is no sample code. You learn things by chance, and heaven help you if you try to find something in the index (for example, "subform" is not in the index). Did I learn? Yes. But only because I was taking over a project that had already been written, so the book supplemented the code I was deciphering. Admittedly, part of the problem is in Access itself - too much behind the scenes processing which requires no code. Access also has a number of different interfaces ... I had hoped this book would explain when to use which one and why. No such luck.

For a some time I've been looking for a book which will be simple enough to help me start programing with VBA for Aplication. When I found this un my local bookstore, I hoped it will be the one. Well it's a pretty good book. It cover most of the topic's needed for programing in VBA. But it does'nt have one thing which is most inportant (in my opinion). Like a most of other books on this subjects, this one explain items from VBA for aplication in randomly select order. So it does'nt show you how to start building an aplication from very begining, and it does'nt help you if somethings go wrong in your leyerning from your book. I hope in future this writer will give more space to explanations about possible mistake that one can make in programming.

If you have already spent time zipping around in Access, trying to make it do stuff, this book is a Godsend. Excellent drill-down into the guts of Access, including high-level overview of how Access is put together and how it "thinks". This is a top-notch, practical guide to mastering Access (at least mastering it to the point where you can crack open the Access 2000 Developer's Handbook (Getz/Litwin) and get it. Easily 5 stars *****. b.

I was given the book by a programmer to help me develop my beginning Access and database design skills. I got hung up on page 183 with a macro that won't work (the programmer who gave me the book has been unable to resolve the problem either). An e-mail to Susann Novalis and a visit to her long out of date web site have not been fruitful. Given the number of books Ms. Novalis has published, and reviews on those books on Amazon.com, she seems to be a prolific writer who cares little for the quality of her work or the support of her readers.

Useful hints, lots of oblivious data, no information about MS-misguiding "help", all together nice, but not THE BOOK about macros. For whom is this written ?

Very good book if you are looking for information on Access 95. This book (and the disk) is designed for Access95 and later. The publisher made a change in the book title without the author's permission. The publisher decided at the last minute to add "For Windows 95 and Windows 3.1." This information was obtained via email from Susan Novalis