Another Weekend Warrior said
Programming books usually take one of three approaches. It either assumes you know absolutely nothing and gives you a very exhaustive history of not only the subject at hand, but programming in general. Or, the book is written "cookbook" style. Finally, some programming books are written as reference books.
This book claims to be a reference book, but it's not. As someone who's programmed for over a decade in a ton of languages and just had to learn enough to get this project done, I wanted a reference book so that I could say, "how do you write an 'if' statement?" "What's the syntax for logical operators in this language?" Stuff like that. You will find *none* of that in this book's index or table of contents.
For example, I had to write a simply if block. if ((condition A) and (condition B) Then 'Do something
I didn't know if the "and" was supposed to be && or AND or something else. So I looked up "logical operators" in the index. Nothing. So I then looked up just "operators". Nothing! Google to the rescue!
I needed to know how to increment a variable. In many languages (Perl, C/C++, PHP), if you have a variable named x, incrementing it would be as simple as x++. I may be wrong, but it doesn't appear that can be done in VBA and you'd have to do x = x + 1. It would be nice if there was a section quickly explaining this stuff.
There are a TON of examples such as this. For example, the books talks about functions. None of the examples, however, show you how to return a value from a function. The syntax is different than in most other languages, so it should at least be given a small mention. Again, google to the rescue!
In some cases, although you can't find it in the table of contents or the index, it *is* in the book. Of course, this then forces you to just aimlessly search from page to page trying to find what you need. For this project I'm doing, because I know nothing of this new language every page teaches me something I didn't know. So I found myself putting post it notes on pages. "Well, I'll need this bit of information to finish this project so let me just bookmark it. Right now, however, I'm looking for X and I still can't find that."
Listen, there is information in there and if you know nothing of VBA, you'll get something from this book (the only reason why I didn't give it 1 star). However, I bought it specifically because it said it was a reference. When I want to know the answer to something, I want a concise, quick way to look up how to do it so that I can move on. Unix Powertools is the PERFECT example of such a book and is probably the best cross-referenced book I ever read. In the end, I should have just saved my money and used google. I'll be returning this book.
Bill R. O. Neal said
I used this book to finalize an Excel project promised to a client that I soon realized would require some kind of programming. I do have a programming background and I think that always helps, but I think even w/o that, this book may just do the trick for anybody (It even has a section to teach some basic programming skills and show these skills using VBA for Excel.)
The project was successful only because of this book (and my hard work! - but we're not reviewing that here! ;-)
Worth every pennny.
Nada Amin said
This is the best book I've found to quickly learn Excel VBA. I am an experienced programmer but I had no knowledge of VBA before reading this book. The book gives instant gratification with useful samples that are easily adapted. It teaches by example and still manages to get general and useful techniques across. In short, for my purpose (quickly picking up Excel VBA without getting terribly bored), this book is perfect.
Rodney A. Biser said
When I buy a book I think I going to get HELP NOT frustrated! They make the book cheap then make you buy the most importation one. It's like selling you crack for $1 and when you're hooked then make you pay $1,000 for more.
Qi Zhong said
I started working for a hedge fund when I brought this book because I don't know how to use VBA, and impressed my colleages with my rapid improvement in VBA programming. It helps a lot and have a lot of good tricks. Will be very useful if you know some level of programming.
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