Learning Word Programming

Rating:
Summary: updated and retitled Writing Word Macros
Review: "Learning Word Programming" has been updated to include Word 2000 and was retitled. The new title is: "Writing Word Macros: An Introduction to Programming Word using VBA" (ISBN: 1-56592-725-7).

Rating:
Summary: very good reference
Review: As mentioned in another review, I thought the book lacked enough useful exercises to practice Word programming. I bought this book because I couldn't find any others at the time specifically addressing Word programming and in the end, I had to search for another book to supplment it. I found it much more useful as a reference than as a learning tool.

Rating:
Summary: Not for people who actually need to learn Word programming
Review: As mentioned in another review, I thought the book lacked enough useful exercises to practice Word programming. I bought this book because I couldn't find any others at the time specifically addressing Word programming and in the end, I had to search for another book to supplment it. I found it much more useful as a reference than as a learning tool.

Rating:
Summary: Good Theory Book BUT Lack exercises
Review: I bought this book based on the reviews below, I'm a beginner in the VBA world (first book) and I liked how the author writes and explain the theory about VBA BUT unfortunately he barely have any exercise that would demonstrate what he is talking about on the chapter that just ended (only in the end of the book he gives some exercises "THE FAX example". Programming for me (a true beginner that came from the Network world) is like Math, you can show all the math theories that you want but if you don't give some exercises to demonstrate your theories it gets hard for US BEGINNERS to "see" the practicality of the theory just explained. I agree that he does not have to waist 500 more pages writing exercises, but if he could include 1 or 2 exercise for each topic that he explained It would be great for us real beginners in the VBA world to understand. For me that is the difference between beginner and experience programmers, when you have experience just having the theory can be sufficient and a reference book will do the work. You can understand the key concepts, mainly because you have PAST experiences to back it up... If you want a good theory book to show you the key concepts this is it, BUT if you also want to have a Hands On understanding of how VB editor works with the VBA world and how to apply the main VBA codes, well for now you will need another book.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book, Even For Advanced Programmers
Review: Let me start by saying I am not a Visual Basic programmer, until now! I had a project that needed a solution. My research lead me to Visual Basic for Application's Word Object Model. Not having any significant experience in VBA I needed a way to get up to speed quickly. I first bought the Guy-Davis book Word97 VBA and found it simplistic and not providing enough technical information to accomplish my task. I then purchased the Word 2000 Programmers Reference Handbook which told me everything I ever wanted to know about the Word Object Model, however, it didn't really explain how and when to use the enumerators and other such objects, which are very important when programming. I work with 5 different languages and felt very lost with this book.

Then I purchased Steven Roman's book "Learning Word Programming". Spent a weekend reading it and by Monday I was more than ready to tackle my project. After reading his book using the Word 2000 Programmers Reference became my next best friend because Mr. Roman's clear and concise approach to explaing everything (sans fluff, as he says other authors have a tendency to do) helped even a seasoned programmer, such as myself.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to become a programmer or is now a programmer. Yes, it was boring to read the 'Programming 101' end of it but after getting through all of it I was pleasantly surprised at how a little refresher helped me look at my project from a new perspective.

Again, get the book! It saved me hours of work.

Dan Borden [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: A great introductory- to intermediate-level book!
Review: Steve Roman clearly explains the most important of the Word objects, with useful real-world examples thrown in. I had spent several weeks programming Word VBA on my own before getting this book, and wish I'd had Chapter 14-"The Range and Selection Objects" when I started! (As it was, I spent hours looping through the VBA help files trying to figure out how to get the range object to do what I wanted...aaaaargh!)

It's true, the book spends nine chapters on intro programming skills and the VB editor, to the detriment of more examples. Beginners will rejoice, while intermediates will wish the book went into more detail and had more of Steve's concise code snippets. Even so, the book has many "been there" tips and pointers that are worth the price of admission.

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Summary: The best book on Word VBA available.
Review: There are only two specific commercial books available on programming in Word 97, and this one is the best.

For those who don't know the VBA development environment, there are a couple of chapters to get you up to speed (or to provide reminders to those who've been away for awhile).

For those who don't know the basic VB language, four chapters summarize the core of the language (obviously, only the main statements are covered). However, since many of the examples are stated in terms of VBA, instead of plain VB, these chapters are still useful.

Then in chapter 9, the real book gets underway.

Chapter 9: Object Models

Chapter 10: The Word Object Model

Chapter 11: The Application Object

Chapter 12: The Document Object

Chapter 13: The Section and HeaderFooter Objects

Chapter 14: The Range and Selection Objects

Chapter 15: The Find and Replace Objects

Chapter 16: The Table Object

Chapter 17: The List Object

Chapter 18: Shortcut Key Bindings

Chapter 19: Built-in Dialog Opetions

Chapter 20: Custom Dialog Boxes

Chapter 21: Menus and Toolbars.

The coverage by object, especially to someone who doesn't know the object model, is invaluable. Even if you already know the model, since most of what gets done in Word gets done via an object, finding out how to do something with this book is easy. I opened the book up to chapter 14 and started reading, and immediately learned what the Range and Selection objects were and what they were for.

Most books treat the objects and the object model as an aside, something that just happens to be there (and oh, gee, I hope you understand how they all fit together and what they do). Not so with this book. The objects of the model and what to do with them are at the core of the book.

Rating:
Summary: Good book. Not for advanced programmers.
Review: This book has saved me. It is the best book I have found for someone learning to write VBA programs for Word. It explains things very clearly and concisely, with short examples.

From my experience, one book seldom is enough to learn programming. If you are a beginning-to-intermediate VBA programmer, get this book. Also get the Word 97 Macro and VBA Handbook by Guy Hart-Davis. It is aimed a little more at the beginning level, and takes more time to explain the basics. If you are an experienced programmer, try VB&VBA in a Nutshell: The Language from O'Reilly press for a good reference book (this book is beyond my level, but it is well-recommended on this Amazon site). Another useful book is Word 97 Annoyances by O'Reilly press.

I wish this book had been longer, but I think to do that the author would have needed to add more about Visual Basic in general, and there are already a lot of other books on that subject. A good beginning book on general VB is Beginning Visual Basic by Peter Wright.

Rating:
Summary: Well written but not a good reference book
Review: This is a good book for learning Word Programming, but if you want a reference book, look elsewhere. It is well written and informative, but does not have enough detail for reference use.

Rating:
Summary: Good choice for this topic, but not up to O'Reilly standards
Review: This is the first O'Reilly book I've ever bought that has disappointed me.

I will say this for it: the author does cover the Word object model well, and his examples are short and to the point. At the moment it has very little competition, so if you need to write Word programs you should probably buy this book. However, I found it so annoying that I have had difficulty making any productive use of it.

I bought it because I was having trouble finding adequate documentation of the Word "object model" online. I'll admit I was approaching the subject differently from most readers, because I was interested in controlling Word externally using JavaScript with Microsoft's wscript and cscript programs. (If this means nothing to you, find out all you can about Microsoft's Windows Scripting Host.)

Consequently, I was disappointed to find that the first 108 pages of the book constitute a beginner's introduction to programming in Visual Basic. There are already a million books in the world that do a thorough job of that, including resources available online from Microsoft.

I also found that whenever the author left the specifics of his topic and branched into computer science areas, he did not really know what he was talking about. At one point he claims "if object A has a property or method that returns object B, then we will consider object B a child of object A." I have been working with object oriented programming languages for over a decade, and I have never heard child or parent used in this manner.

In the last appendix he describes some other programming languages, after saying in the introduction that he hates it when people pad their books with irrelevant materials. And, of all things, he picks COBOL and Fortran as the examples! (Name something COBOL and Fortran are relevant to in 1999 other than the Y2K problem.) He ends the book with an example in Lisp carefully contrived to make unnecessarily visible use of quote, lambda, car, cdr, and atom. He then uses that example to say that it is a good thing that Microsoft chose BASIC rather than something like Lisp as their embedded language. Not only do I personally disagree with him, but this appears to be a direct dig at the Free Software Foundation, which has decided to use a Lisp based scripting language for the tools in their system. For that matter, Gnu Emacs has used Lisp as its internal language since the early eighties, and I found it much much easier to get started with than Visual Basic in any form.