Hi Mike,
<Warning, seemingly random sewerage>
I suggest you defer working on the Access app for now and continue and concentrate with your vanilla VB studies. Stay with the pace set out by the instructor. You can sprint later, just do the measured laps for now.
Ask your instructor lots of questions, that's what you paid him / her for -- to guide and help. (If your course is an on-line course then post yer questions here, I'm pretty sure help will find it's way to you).
Try to get the instructor to help you establish REAL good programming habits now, they'll become second nature and will be invaluable tools down the road. Code comments, variable naming and white space are underated, under emphasized and under utilized aspects of programming in my opinion.
Once you finish this initial course, you might consider taking the next, or intermediate level VB course, and then after that perhaps the advanced one. While most of us are fully capable of learning quite well on our own thank you very much, going the course route forces you to adhere to a schedule and a structured path, with the additional benefit of an instructor to answer those strange questions that don't seem to be easily found in course materials.
Going the course route will also tend to give you a more rounded understanding than self study, as we tend to avoid those topics that fall into categories like "not all that sexy" or "don't think I'll need that"; <sniff>.
Once you REALLY feel you've a pretty good foundation in VB then consider applying those skills to office automation like Access, either by VBA or by referencing the appropriate libraries in VB (my preference). You'll find it easier going this route (IMO) as the only new concepts will be the actual office automation stuff; variable declaration, looping, conditional branching, error trapping, program struture, fundamental object oriented stuff, bla, bla -- all that will be old hat, a foundation you build on.
This might be a bit to chew on at this point, so I killed the next page+ of rambling (for now). If I see that further MP ranting might actually contribute to the growing discussion I might just pipe back in. For now I just hope some of this made sense and more importantly, actually helped to some degree.
Cheers,
Michael.
