Rating:  Summary: A solid, much-needed guide to programming in Word VBA Review: What a useful and needed book! Steven Roman has delivered a concise, on-target introduction to the theory and practice of programming in Microsoft Word's VBA. The book offers a two-chapter introduction to good programming practices and the IDE, (mostly useful for beginners, though I picked up a couple of helpful IDE hints). Four chapters address the constructs and syntax of Word VBA, covering in about 60 pages what many intro books waste entire trees to convey. But the heart of the book is the nine-chapter introduction to Word's Object Model, which mixes reference-like descriptions of objects, properties, and methods with implementation details that are hard to find in the help documents, and also throws in some useful, Word-specific practical programming advice. I particularly liked the minimalist 'sample code' snippets -- they let me focus on the point being illustrated without forcing me to wade through elaborate wrappings -- but some readers might prefer more examples, or prefer the 'sample application' approach. While the book is targeted at 'beginning programmers', there is an important caveat: the conciseness of the text and the simplicity of the examples may not encourage beginners to visualize all of the possibilities inherent in the Object Model and WordVBA. If you know what you want to do in Word, but don't know how to do it, this book is going to be extremely helpful. If you don't know what you want to do -- if you are looking for ideas for real-world Word applications -- look elsewhere first, then get this book to help you make them real.
Rating:  Summary: very good reference Review: What can I say, I found this book very informative. Also, check out his second book. The writing is clear and concise. This book isn't going to *make* you a Word programmer, but it can be a useful reference. It seems Word programming is all about creativity. Obviously, creativity is something that can't be taught.
|