Customer Reviews

AutoCAD 2004 VBA: A Programmer's Reference

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a book for everybody. The Beginner and the Pro. I come to this book after two years of working experience with AutoCAD VBA and every time when I have the opportunity to read its pages I never cease to find new good details.
The presentation is good and the macros I tried were working without problems.
The Appendix D, "AutoCAD 2000, 2002, and 2004 Object Model Cross Reference", is a good piece for the user with different releases.

Thank you, Joe for so marvelous book.

Sutphin assumes you are already proficient in the manual use of AutoCAD. He does not waste your time teaching this. Instead, he gives an advanced usage mode. Where perhaps you would like to make designs in a programmatic fashion.

There are several ways this could have been done. But Autodesk decided to enable (in a manner of speaking) an "API" that is Visual Basic for Applications. To be sure, there are programmers versed in C++, Java, C# or other languages that may well look down on this choice. But VBA is a decent programming language. Being descended from Basic, it may not have some of the notational elegance of C++, say. Still, you can express a lot of computing logic in VBA.

Most importantly, VBA enables object oriented coding. The book points out that you have two types of objects. Those you can define within VBA, as in any other OO language. Plus the very natural objects that arise in your AutoCAD design. If you study the book carefully, you can see how these two types can often be finessed seamlessly together.

Suppose your background is engineering, and not computing. So that explains your AutoCAD experience. Perhaps you've never had OO programming before. The logical mapping described here is an excellent way to learn the more abstract OO concepts, for you can relate these directly to your expertise.

Our developer says this book has been a great help to him.

This book is too broad and shallow. Can hardly find a complete and useful program. Seem like it tries to cover everything but nothing covered in detail. Connecting to Excel and words is also just connection only. After connecting, then what to do?? The author said go and read other books if you want to know in depth. If you want to see a lot of API or commands, this book is for you. No good for learning something useful and practical.