Many thanks for your reply. I am glad I am not alone in struggling to find good books and training resources. IT training is generally expensive and I don't have a budget to go on 4-day training courses so I am basically doing everything myself and trying to imagine workplace scenarios where an employer would ask me to do x or y etc. This is not easy, but upgrading my skills from Access to SQL Server was no option as Access is not an in demand database. I did attend a T-SQL training course at Learning Tree but that was a one off as they had reduced the price of the course by 70%.

The combination of training resources I am using now is youtube, internet articles, forums and books. However, the books are very much a hit and miss process. The "in easy steps" series are not bad (the earlier editions were better as the code was more amalgamated and now it is split up (although I must say with more explanations)). I would say generally though, unless you have a hefty training budget then there is an element of pot luck and even with the training courses your understanding will depend on the strength of the training materials, quality of the teacher and your learning curve. I guess some people are naturals at picking things up, but for me it can sometimes be a slog as I prefer regimented and formal training programs so I can then understand the basics of an application's capability in full.

The great fault in technical writing is reams of unexplained code which results in the reader trying and think out what the program means and if they are going through it for the first time, this can be hard and open to misinterpretation.

When I first studied foreign languages, there was a formal training process involving a dictionary and grammar book. Sadly, this type of formal and logical approach is missing in many programming books as well as an affinity with the potential reader. In other words many books seem to be written by authors who do not spend adequate time thinking about their audience.