26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A badly needed resource for Outlook programming., August 2, 1999
This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself Outlook 2000 Programming in 24 Hours (Paperback)
Simply stated, this is a very well written book by an acknowledged authority on Outlook programming. I learned to program Outlook 98 from the Microsoft Press book entitled "Building Applications with Outlook 98." While that book, and the newer "Programming Outlook and Exchange" are essential to anyone who programs Outlook regularly, Sue Mosher's book is aimed at getting a new Outlook programmer up to speed quickly. This book teaches techniques and answers questions that are valuable even for someone who has already grasped the essentials of Outlook forms. Her section on the new VBA capabilities of Outlook 2000 is a terrific tutorial and should get most programmers up to speed quickly. This book belongs in your library if you work with Exchange server and intend to do any custom forms or automation. It's worth every penny. My only quibble is that a CD-ROM of code examples--kind of like the MSDN library, but for Outlook--would have been nice. However, Sue Mosher's internet site, more than compensates for this ommission.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beginner to Expert in 24 Simple Lessons, September 27, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself Outlook 2000 Programming in 24 Hours (Paperback)
As a beginner to VBA and Programming itself I needed a book that started at a basic level, yet ended with the power I needed to write my tools. Sue's book fit this perfectly. The book is very easy to follow and understand, each lesson building on what you learned in the last.
I highly recommend this book to anyone that wants to harness the full power of Outlook. I had know idea you could do so much with a couple of lines of code. This book has already saved me hundreds of hours of work that I used to do by hand that is now completed in a matter of seconds by VBA code.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disorganized and light on details, August 9, 2000
This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself Outlook 2000 Programming in 24 Hours (Paperback)
When I purchased this book, I was expecting to really learn how to program Outlook. What I got was a choppy book that doesn't cover the subject in much depth whatsoever.
This book suffers on a number of fronts. I think much of the blame lies on the publisher with only some of it on the author. The fact is, Sams has created a whole "Teach yourself X in 24 hours" series. Each book in the series uses 24 small chapters that you can read very quickly. This format is a downfall because it artificially forces an author into a fixed format. You must have 24 chapters, one per "hour." Each chapter must be very short to avoid exceeding an hour's reading time. Many of the chapters in this book were less than 20 pages each. With tables and screen shots, that doesn't leave much room for prose. Indeed, with these restrictions, an author cannot spend a lot of time on complex subjects or create chapters at appropriate locations dictated by the material.
As a result of the format, Mosher has produced a book that only introduces the subject of Outlook forms, Outlook VBScript programming, and Outlook VBA programming without much depth. Many of the chapters are simply a rehash of VBScript and VBA reference material without much expository description. While this material is appropriate for inclusion, it burns about seven chapters out of 24. As a result, there isn't much room left over for other things.
Another problem is that the book is choppy. It jumps back and forth between VBScript and VBA almost at random within chapters making it very difficult to read. If you are only interested in Outlook forms, for instance, you have to wade through a large amount of VBA material searching for the VBScript material. You can't just skip a few VBA-only chapters.
While descriptions of both VBScript and VBA are appropriate for the book, the constant context switches also make it very difficult to use the book in any reference manner. After looking up something in the book, one can't determine whether the material applies to VBScript or VBA without rereading whole sections of the chapter to pick up the context.
Finally, the largest fault that I see with this book is a lack of deep examples. Most of the examples are very, very small and disconnected from each other. I would have liked to see more material on VBScript and forms since that is the easiest way to create applications within Outlook itself.
In the end, I get the feeling that Mosher understands the material but didn't have enough paper to say anything useful. Forced with a difficult choice of burning pages on VBScript and VBA tutorials or producing in-depth examples, she chose the tutorial material and produced an acceptable introductory book that leaves that vetran programmer wanting more.
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