Customer Reviews

Excel 2003 Programming: A Developer's Notebook (Developer's Notebook)

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

 

 

Readable, knowledgeable comprehensive This is not the first book a beginning Excel programmer should buy, but once he or she has become comfortable with the basics of VB or VBA, then this is an essential book for transitioning to sophisticated Web and .NET applications. It concisely shows you how to do a lot of things that other books blur over.

To most Excel users, it is merely a neat spreadsheet. But to you, it is a programming environment in its own right, with a specialised UI. Viewed from this perspective, the book shows various new directions Excel has taken to increase its programmability.

Perhaps the most intriguing is using it to access Web Services. There has been a huge buildup of Web Services Description Language, and a lot of speculation about what a successful Web Service would look like. Well, nothing yet has emerged as a killer app.

But Webb shows how you can use Excel to dip your toes into this field. Specifically, he indicates how to hook it into the Web Services of Amazon and Google. And along the way, you get to pick up some XML. If you don't know XML, this in itself is a good way to motivate learning it.

The utility of the example Web Services is that they can take some of the mystique and abstractness out of the subject, provided you spend the time to understand them. Simply as pedagogy, you can then assess future discussions on Web Services in a more experienced light. Separate from, and independent of, whether you'd ever want to use Excel to interact with future Web Services.

Of course, the book describes other topics. And you may well have no interest in Web Services. But to me, this forward looking aspect is the best part of the book.

Worhtless unless you are:
1.) IT developer at large company
who is
2.) In charge of all IT purchasing
and
3.) allowed to set and enforce all IT standards for
Office and all Web standards

The book focus' very narrowly to solve problems no one has,
a very typical example is how to download an Amazon.com object
so that you may use Excel to search Amazon. The author then mentions that Amazon doesn't parse the output as he would like,
so you have some clean up work to do.
If you have a screaming need to use Excel to search Amazon for John Grisham books, this tome is for you.
Otherwise forget it.

The writer presents Excel as an application object floating on a sea of XML data and explores Excel's integration with Sharepoint, Web Services, IRM (Information Rights Management), and Infopath (Microsoft's forms-based application development system).

This is not a book for the average Excel user.

This is not a book for those wanting to learn how to do VBA macros for Excel.

This is not a reference book for Excel, VBA, or anything else.

What it is, is a good book. The author, Jeff Webb, is an experienced writer with several books on programming topics for the Microsoft platform. Serious programmers will expand their view of Excel as they read and as they do the many examples that are complete with code and screen shots. The 294-page book makes a great week-end reader.

This isn't your standard O'Reilly nutshell style book. It's not trying to give theory and reference. This is a step by step book that is heavy with screen shots and embedded code samples. It covers the XML aspects of Excel 2003 exclusively, and branches off into InfoPath (Microsoft XML access product) and SharePoint (the data sharing service.)

I found the writing a little terse and stiff, but overall it was reasonable. The were too many screenshots for my taste, even given the 'notebook' style.

I recommend this book for anyone looking for a step by step guide to using the XML features of Excel 2003. If you don't know Excel all that well, or XML, or VB, then you aren't going to learn it here.

While I am a novice at programming (having a very limited acronym vocabulary) this book helped me figure what Excel is really good for. But, to tell you that would spoil the ending.It is absolutely riveting.