Professional Excel Development: The Definitive Guide to Developing Applications Using Microsoft Excel and VBA, and .NET 2nd Edition

Every once in a while a technical book comes along which strikes the perfect balance between "technical detail", "practical application", and "vision". I am, like many people who buy self-help style technical books (as opposed to full out college textbooks), a self declared power-user. Power users are folks who need to get stuff down; not much time for parsing minute details and theoretical concepts. We look for ways to make our day-to-day business tasks more automated. If you're self employed like me, you're very business existence depends on automation.This book is special for 3 reasons:1) Practicality of advanced topics:As a power-user, when was the last time you found yourself seriously looking at c programming, ADO, and SQL? The authors give us real life uses for these sorts of things, in a very focused manner. You walk away with an excellent understanding of why and when to use these things (notice I didn't say thorough understanding. The authors wisely admit that's someone else job, and point you in the right direction), based on what you're trying to accomplish.2) Relevance of good programming practices:Most books on programming teach "good programming practice" as if you are going to be working in an enterprise environment, with a team of engineers and professors. That's fine but in reality power-users work under deadlines and completely alone. No one cares how well you comment your code. As long as the thing works, when you want it too, then you've programmed enough. The authors explain a concept called "Interfacing" in a way that makes "good programming" a very practical time investment. I know "Interfacing" is not a new concept (as none of the topics in this book are). Its all in how the authors connect the dots. The relationship of concepts is far more important than the concept itself.3) You want to know more:Usually that's a bad thing, but not in this case because you know why. 90% of technical authors write some form of a dictionary, sprinkled with examples. But the end goal of a program is automation (or at least it should be), whether its iTunes or VBA. Take a repetitious task and automate it. Power-users don't have the luxury of slogging through a dictionary. If I spend time learning an advanced technical topic, there must be clear, reasonably obtainable objectives. The authors accomplish this by a lot. This is a tech book that really sheds light on the usefulness of all those seemingly unuseful-to-you type topics that have spawned so many 1300 page books.If you've hung with me this far, you might have noticed I don't talk about Excel. That's because this book really isn't about Excel. Excel acts mostly as a cloths-line, linking various topics, methods, and recommendations. The authors tell us at the beginning, Excel is an excellent platform for fast application development and prototyping. THAT's really what the book is about.It's too bad books aren't written this way more often. Hope this review was helpful

P.E.D. has made my Excel application feel all grown up. After reading Chapter 3 "Excel and VBA Development Best Practices" I stayed up for three nights retooling my code from top to bottom. Applied coding standards, changed big gnarled messes of variables to classes and much more. I couldn't resist it, and couldn't bear to look at my "amateur" code any longer.Then I flipped to Chapter 15 "VBA Error Handling" and I again realized it was time for another quantum leap. I am almost done with that work, and my client has commented how my application has suddenly felt more "stable" and "mature". There are a couple of things lacking in Chapter 15 but it's still extremely useful.' Concepts I would Like to Hear More About1) The concept of "rethrow" error handling for functions is begun, but not followed up by any examples of good error handling for functions that need to return specific values (not error handling booleans).2) I would also like a discussion of hybrid use of the "rethrow" and the "function return value" methods and/or a full example of a robust method that covers the details of entry points, subroutines and functions.3) It is not clear whether or not command buttons on forms are entry points (i.e. events they trigger like "sub cmdSort_Click()"). The book states that every user-initiated action is an entry point including events, but I don't think they treated this case fully. For instance, if my form contains the buttons "Sort", "OK", and "Cancel". The book shows what to do with the cancel, but not whether the user clicking on "Sort" constitutes an entry point within an entry point and how to error-handle that.The book will improve your skills dramatically.It also comes with a CD containing all the code samples plus some useful tools for tidying up and managing your code.Feel your income potential rise.Enjoy!Updated 6/2018: This book is still my favorite tech book. Now, however, you'll have to work to hunt down a copy. It's worth it. Like many great books, it will speak to you from different angles and teach you different things as you develop the need, the openess and the perspective to hear it.

I recently developed a system to be used in my own project management business by using excel and ms access. And this book has helped me at every step.The only reason I haven't given this book 5 stars is because, though the book is not meant for begineers I still think a few more examples especially for the window API chapter as those are tricky as you do not get intelli-sense help.If you are a first time developer as I was, do not be discouraged when in the first read you do not understand much, just hang in there give it one more read and things will start falling into place like pieces of a puzzle.

Fast. Efficient, As Advertised. On Time.-- All exactly as you hope it would be. Although the book was published over 10 years ago, the publisher, to my mind, has garnered a well earned reputation over the years for high quality and standards -- and the authors are of broad and deep experience -- in short it was an easy purchase decision. The emphasis on a "Best Practices" approach to application design and development is spot on; consistently applied, modeled and demonstrated throughout the text, The depth and range of topics covered, the numerous screen shots and the generous amounts of code examples and proofs-of-concepts were exactly what I was looking for. The book absorbed my attention for a full week of late night study and practice, revisions and extensions; The book will be a trusted reference that I will come back to again and again in the hopes of gleaning more and deeper insights that I can apply to my projects over time. I highly recommend this book to any level of serious student seeking to eventually attain their goal of becoming a "professional" programmer.