Microsoft Office 97 Developer's Handbook

Rating:
Summary: The best developer's guide I've read, bar none
Review: If you are expecting a complete reference or a beginners guide to application development then you will probably be disappointed. If, however you are a developer with some experience trying to get to grips with this beast called Office 97 then this book is well worth a read.

The author is clearly an accomplished developer and her style is business-like, "to the point" and CONSISTENT (you're not assumed to be a rocket scientist one minute and a complete novice the next).

As any developer knows, there are often numerous ways to do the same thing when building applications. This book shows, and explains why it is often better to do things one way rather than another in MS Office. As a developer myself, I found that this book gave enough information to put me on the right track, but without labouring the point. The code examples have also been well thought out, illustrating the topics concisely so that they can be digested without necessarily having to try them out in order to understand them.

It is not often that I read such books from cover to cover, but I was left feeling that I had been brought up to speed. If you need to write Office applications, read this book and save yourself some time!

Rating:
Summary: The best developer's guide I've read, bar none
Review: If you have absolutely no knowldegeof Visual basic, the Windows API, or programming development, this bood is a good general review. Otherwise, look for more horsepower elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: Needs more on automation.
Review: This book has a good premise but does not come through. I think most developers buying this book are looking for detailed help on automating the Office suites individual applications. There is one included chapter on automation and it is fairly good but the rest of the book is about using the individual apps. I would think anybody wanting knowledge about the individual applications would buy a book specifically on that app. In trying to do too much, this book ends up doing too little. Good for an overview and that is about it.

Rating:
Summary: Returned it
Review: This book is about the development of VB apps, not developing the apps themselves. Stuff like how to determine the users needs, and examples of the forms you might use to plan your project. Ummm... where's the stuff on how to write your code? No use for beginners, but app development managers might like it.

Rating:
Summary: All in all, pretty weak
Review: This book would have been better if the author had not attempted to cover so many topics at once. The book waffles between management theory, the history of Microsoft, and actual code. The scarcity of real usable code that is specific to Office is what ruined the book for me. Mostly the book serves as a beginning VB(A) textbook. All in all the book is ok if aimed at someone who is primarily involved in document publishing rather than code or to a true novice developer. It's selling point as 'an updated edition of the successful Developing Applications with Microsoft Office 95' is pretty weak, considering how little code there is in the book actually relating to the Office suite programs. Don't expect to find any object module listing. I would recommend instead Office 97 Visual Basic Programmer's Guide..