Customer Reviews

Financial Applications using Excel Add-in Development in C/C++ (The Wiley Finance Series)

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

 

 

It's a 500 page book plus thousands of lines of source code, so your answers are in there ... somewhere. But the whole product is painfully disorganized.

The source code does not provide an adequate solution to producing Excel add-ins, it is just too brittle, hard to modify/maintain, and confusing. There are 141 functions that read "if Excel 2007 do this, if Excel 2003 or before, do that..." which would all have to be re-written every time a new version of Excel comes out. Instead of working around the Microsoft SDK files, he changed them directly, so again you'd have to adjust them to a new version of Excel. One of the big problems with the code was the author's choice to make his "cpp_xloper" class the center of the project, which contains a huge amount of code for moving data around through Excel's xloper/xloper12 data structures, including overriding the += operator so it adds numbers and concatenates strings. This was a big mistake in my opinion because it's ALL unnecessary. You only need ONE function that needs to know anything about xlopers -- the one that converts the data to be sent to/received from the Excel C API. That should be the only function that even cares if you're in Excel 2007 or before. All of the rest of the code should be done in normal C/C++ data structures. That right there saves you about 90% of the work!!

A large portion of the book is devoted to explaining this approach and documenting the source code, so to the extent the source code is bad, so is the book.

To be fair, after two weeks of going through a couple thousand lines of spaghetti code, I was able to write a nice C++ wrapper that does everything I want. The information is in there ... somewhere.

This book might qualify for the "Most Specific Title" award, but the book is exactly what it claims to be. A guide to developing financial applications using excel add-ins written in C/C++.

This book's target audience is someone familiar both with C/C++ as well as Excel -- not a beginner in either. Additionally, this book is not intended to be a reference for either the language or the application, but is instead a course in developing add-ins for Excel using C++. If this is what you're looking to do, this is the book you need.

The book does not have any competition, does it? I am grateful to the author, but think that one could do a better job presenting the material.

If you have not heard of XLW, do try it out first.

The greatest disadvantage of the book is author could not decide if he writes as a software designer or financial clerk. Book is quite large, gives lots of information but the manner it does it is a bit messy. But the greatest shame is: the code samples included on CD does not compile without errors. Im using recent Visual C++ Studio 2010, and was unsuccessful in compiling samples. On the other hand, I really do not like C++ samples using own designed classes and methods, this really is not helpful in understanding the matter book is trying to explain. Much greater help is raw, ordinary C language, designing a simple c++ wrapping class, when you understand the domain of XLL development, is not a big deal. I would recommend to use EXCEL 2007/2010 SDK first, then do any web search to download any working XLL sample.

Very complete, but hard to read/follow...
I'm an experienced programmer but only starting with Excel programming so maybe that's why...

Also quite expensive, but this seems to be the rule with Finance related books.

Franchement médiocre et j'en suis désolé pour l'auteur. A mon avis il s'est trop éparpillé et finalement ne va jamais vraiment dans les détails de quoi que ce soit ce qui fait que les étapes ne sont pas faciles à suivre pour mettre en pratique les codes.