5 comments about Microsoft Windows Scripting Self-Paced Learning Guide (Pro-Other).

1. This book had everything I was looking for and is a good source of information.



2. I've found this book with excellent content and very helpful for my clients ( I Work in a Technical Support Group for VIP Customers). The author drives you through with very clear language and at the same time funny and keeps you hooked to it.
   
   Highly Recommended! Specially for those deep into Thechnical stuff.



3. I use the book all the time to help groups of customers learn scripting. It jumps into useful examples early in the book. You build on those examples until you get to the point where you are combining the technologies to build useful scripts, like using Active Directory to create a list of computers which you then analyze and configure using Windows Management Instrumentation ( set of extensions to the Windows Driver Model that provides an operating system interface through which instrumented components can provide information and notification ). If you read only to chapter 15 you get a solid background of how WMI exposes a collection of COM scriptable objects that allow various applications to take advantage of the management information, including information about how Active Directory can be manipulated with VB Script.



4. I admit I avoided purchasing this book as I felt I was beyond it since I know Perl. I ran into it again when I purchased Microsoft Windows Administrator's Automation Toolkit (Pro-One-Offs). On the CD there is a e-book form of the book.
   
   I figured why not read it? One possible drawback exists if you pick up the automation toolkit book. You will not get a copy of the scripts. It's not an issue if you don't mind typing. Which for me is better as making mistakes and debugging helped me more then simply watching a script run.
   
   I noticed that the e-book might be an earlier version of the printed book as the scripting style changes for a copy of the scripts.
   
   As to the claims of the scripts not working; I ran into that as well but they are easy to solve. Well except one. You look for computers in AD, the scripting didn't know how to handle a Linux Samba entry.
   
   Overall the book is decent. I was looking for something to give me an introduction to vbscript. Something more then a beginning "howto" script book.
   
   There is not much discussion about the WSH engine. However, for me that was not an issue as I am still in the beginning stages of vbscript. This might be more of an issue as I get more advanced. But, this will probably get solved by an advanced book or looking on the Net.
   
   The book does some basic stuff in the beginning. Loops, if/then, Arrays. Part 2 of the book introduces basic administration. There you will be introduced to file system objects, WMI, and WMI queries. Part 3, takes more advanced administration issues with and introduction to LDAP, ADSI, Searching AD, Configuring Network components, logon scripts, working with registry, and working with printers. Part 4, deals with other apps such as IIS6 and exchange 2003.
   
   The appendix has some info on ADSI, and WMI. It's ok if you are starting out but I think it will grow past it's usefulness.
   
   The scripts in book are simple and straightforward. They don't have a great deal of intelligence built in to deal with unknowns. Probably, not needed as this is an introduction book.
   
   Overall I am happy with the book. It gave me an idea as to some possibilities and it helped me understand better on where to look for stuff.



5. I got this as a freebie ebook when I bought the WMI scripting book.
   What a total waste. I am new to Widows scripting but an old hack at *Nix shell scripting and perl. I needed to do some scripting for a client that doesn't have perl installed universally, but wants scripts to run universally on their windows servers.
   
   I wasted a couple of days beating my head against the wall because I used this book. I finally bought "Windows 2000 Scripting Guide" and got my scripts working.
   
   In addition to the complaints others have left indicating the the author does not explain the programming model, I found myself with a large hole in my foot because this author directed me to point a gun at my boot before pulling the trigger.
   
   I used the sample scripts in the book as a starting point in my scripts, but unwittingly injected really bad practices into my programs.
   
   The author states in Chapter 1:
   "So 'On Error Resume Next' tells the computer that when something is messed up (causing an error), you want the computer to just skip that line and try the next line in the script. This process is called error handling,"
   
   Actually, this is called ERROR HIDING (not handling) and it causes things that are messed up (causing an error) to be hidden from your view so you CAN'T find or fix them.
   
   This is the worst bad practice that can be taught
   
   Here is an example of how bad it is:
   while using this directive your code that looks like:
   IF condition THEN
   positive_action
   ELSE
   negative_action
   END IF
   
   will, when an error is encountered in evaluating the condition, get transmogrified into simply:
   
   positive_action
   
   The "condition" that includes an error ALWAYS evaluates to true.
   I can't think of a worse logic bomb to inject into your code or a better reason to skip this book.

No comments about Professional Visual Basic 2008 (Programmer to Programmer).

No comments about Beginning Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 (Wrox Beginning Guides).

5 comments about Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Professional Step by Step, Second Edition (Step By Step (Redmond, Wash.).).

1. My programing background was in C++, Pascal, and Delphi, so when I got a new job and had to learn VB 6.0 I scrambled to find a book that could teach me the fundamentals. I can honestly say that after reading this book in two weeks I learned VB 6.0. Great book for developers who are beggining or just want to refresh their knowlegh in VB 6.0, a must have.



2. I'm only on page 78, and already I can tell that I'm going to enjoy and learn from this book. Not being familiar with Mr. Halvorson's work, I was a little leary when I noticed that this book was published by Microsoft Press. Dreading page after page of nearly non-human jargon and wording, I was most pleasantly surprised when I began my journey through the easy-to-read pages. If you can follow a recipe, you can learn from this book. Heck, even if you can't follow a recipe, you can still learn, as long as you're willing to do the exercises. Being a beginner in the programming field, I can heartily recommend Microsoft's and Mr. Halvorson's version of VB 6.0 training.



3. This is a great reference book.
   I found the sections on serial communication particularly helpful.
   I'd especially recommend it to someone who is just starting out with VB6.
   It may help you to avoid some bad programming habits.
   
   Cheers.



4. Very good examples. Even comes with CD so you can run the program and look at the code real time. The solutions are everyday answers to problems.



5. It addresses learners at different levels in Visual Basic programming. Learners will find it a good resource for learning VB programming. Recommended !

5 comments about Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0.

1. You can download this book at no charge in pdf format from Lessig's site.



2. Professor Lessig describes how managing copyright for the digital age will have an impact upon every individual in the future. As we develop and share digitial content how we protect or even abuse copyright will determine if the Internet and other digital technologies will improve information for the global citizen. We stand at the door of one of the greatest era in history, however, how we use and protect digitial information will determine how history will judge our efforts for generations to come. Lessig's book gives us the foundation to build upon and will be up to each individual to determine the final outcome.



3. This is an important subject ans deserves a lot more attention.
   
   However, it was clearly written by a lawyer for lawyers. I am a software engineer and read many books in my field - but alas was unable to finish this one - important as it is. Its just way to wordy - if it was reduced in size by at least half - and highlighted the salient points clearly and simply - its would be a much better book IMHO.
   
   If your a lawyer you'll like this book - but anyone else - look elsewhere.
   
   Sorry lawerence.



4. Before Larry Lessig began teaching a course on "cyberlaw" in the 1990s, few people knew this awkward term for "regulation of the Internet." But Lessig, now a professor at Stanford Law School, has always kept close to the bleeding edge of technology. He started programming in high school and later helped the U.S. Supreme Court go digital. Even this book's development shows the author's geek //bona fides:// He revised it using a "wiki," a software platform that allows multiple users to edit the text simultaneously via the Web. While the book's details have changed a bit since the first edition, Lessig's main point is the same. Because of its design, the Internet is perhaps the most "regulable" entity imaginable and, unless its users are careful, it will morph into something that diminishes, rather than enhances, liberty. Moreover, trying to keep the Internet "unregulated" is folly. While this book is sometimes bloated and repetitive, we find that it is still required reading for anyone who cares about the social impact of the most important technology since electrification.



5. If you take Web 2.0 at all seriously then, whatever your political or philosophical persuasion, Larry Lessig's Code: Version 2.0 is a compulsory read. My own political and philosophical persuasion is considerably different from Lessig's and consequently I don't entirely agree with either his conclusions or the weight he attaches to some of his concerns, but I still take my hat off to his methodological and philosophical achievement: Code: Version 2.0 presents a novel and undoubtedly striking re-evaluation of some fundamental social, legal and ethical conceptions and makes an entirely persuasive case that our traditional, deeply-held, and politically entrenched ways of looking at the world simply aren't fit for purpose any more.
   
   Intellectually, this is therefore an extraordinary, eye-opening, paradigm shifting, challenging, exhilarating read. (I note some previous comments that this is a book for lawyers: I'm a lawyer, so perhaps that explains my enthusiasm, but this is no ordinary legal text, and should be of interest to anyone with a political, philosophical or scientific bone in their body.)
   
   Lawrence Lessig charts, with a fair bit of technical specificity, the technical and epistemological grounds for thinking that the internet revolution (and specifically the "Web 2.0" revolution) is as significant as any societal shift in human history. Generally, this is not news for people in the IT industry - who deal with its implications day to day - but for our legal brethren, who tend of be of a conservative (f not technophobic) stripe, this ought to be as revelatory (and revolutionary) as Wat Tyler's march on London. Now we have a hyperlinked, editable digital commons, the assumptions with which we have constructed our society need to be rethunk.
   
   For example, copyright: a law framed in the pre-digital era where there was no ready means to replicate "content" which didn't itself involve considerable labour and expense, it made sense to protect intellectual property in this way. But faced with the new commercial imperatives of the digital age, Lessig argues compellingly that the existing legal framework simply cannot apply, that any attempt to fit it to the new social reality which, QED, must have been beyond the contemplation of the framers of the law is a creative (and therefore potentially illegitimate) legal/political act. Down this path, Lessig's arguments have more interest for consitutional lawyers and may lead the lay reader a little cold.
   
   Lessig provides us with an alternative framework for discussing legal issues like copyright, intellectual property protection and privacy, and is convincing that our old tools for conversing on these issues - which predate the digital revolution in its entirely, let alone the internet revolution or Web 2.0 - just won't give us useful answers to our conundrums. Lessig also re-opens the book on what even counts as law - what we mean by "regulability" - in an environment online where the power exists, by computer code, to create "laws" of a more natural kind - that are laws not because they *should* or *may* not be broken, but because they *cannot* be broken.
   
   Lessig's startling conclusion is therefore to reject entirely the utopian wish, frequently expressed by citizens of the net, that traditional legal controls are dead and that Web 2.0 vouchsafes to us an eternal state of libertarian bliss - but to assert that, quite to the contrary, Web 2.0 is, to use his own ghastly expression, "architected" to allow maximum conceivable regulation, and that activities online are capable of a total regulation that, offline, would never have been feasible. Lessig warns therefore that we stand (or at any rate approach) important political crossroads where the public decisions we make as a community about how we allow internet architecture to develop will have a huge bearing on the development of cyberspace - and therefore our rights and personhood in cyberspace - for the hereafter.
   
   Among the fascinating ideas here, which have application way beyond the legal and digital realms, is the "end-to-end principle", by which the internet is (ugh) architected, which says that for a distributed system to be maximally effective there should be the minimum complexity in the basic network necessary to provide common structure to all users so that they can use the information as flexibly as they want: the complexity should therefore be at the edges of the system and in the hands of the user. Thus the core wiring of the internet is a rudimentary router of tiny packets of data which are then assembled by the end user (in a browser or other application). But the same principle applies to physical transport networks (a road system has less intrinsic complexity than a rail system, for example: the complexity on a road network is pushed to the edge and manifests itself in the vehicles we drive: on a rail network by contrast the train is part of the network), and indeed political and social networks (a liberal political regime has less intrinsic complexity than an interventionist one - the complexity is pushed to the edges of the network and users build that amongst themselves). I thought this was a profound insight, and perhaps has implications beyond the scope of Lessig's thesis, and if properly considered have the effect of mitigating some of the alarm he feels.
   
   Just as he rightly brings the utopians to book for believing their hype about this golden new age of freedom - of course governments and vested interests will figure out the net and how to effectively regulate it, like they have every other social revolution since Wat Tyler's time - I think his own vision is needlessly dystopian. It assumes that code will be able, at some point, to regularly, systematically, reliably and effortlessly know every single fact about every one of us - and hence we are ultimately regulable.
   
   But this isn't realistic. Just as it would be impossible to accurately predict the trajectory of a crisp packet blown across St Mark's Square, no matter how sophisticated your equipment and scientific knowledge, the web is too weird, people's applications for it too dynamic and unpredictable and the "true meaning" of our communications too innately susceptible of multiple interpretations for any code to ever fully get the better of us (not even really close). For example, in my organisation I have spent months, with considerable IT infrastructural support, trying to figure how to reliably capture simple, non-controversial attributes of regular documents which routinely and predictably pass between an easily identified and small community of users across a tightly defined and fully monitored part of our internal computer system - and this has proved so far to be quite impossible. The idea that one might reliably capture deliberately masked communications even from this minute sample seems absurd, and the idea that one could do this across the whole world wide web preposterous.
   
   Just as the spammers and virus programmers keep ahead of the filters, our freedom is adaptable and valuable enough to keep ahead of the Man.
   
   Well, that's the hope, anyway. But in the mean time this book is certainly food for thought. It could not be more highly recommended by this reviewer.
   
   Olly Buxton

5 comments about Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Unleashed.

1. OK... I can see why Microsoft Visual Studio has been such a popular IDE for developers. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Unleashed from Lars Powers and Mike Snell does a nice job in explaining the value of the latest version of this classic, as well as being an in-depth guide to the feature set...
   
   Contents:
   Part 1 - An Introduction to Visual Studio 2005/.NET: A Quick Tour of Visual Studio 2005; A Quick Tour of the IDE; .NET Framework and Language Enhancements in 2005
   Part 2 - The Visual Studio 2005 Environment - In-depth: Solutions and Projects; Browsers and Explorers; Introducing the Editors and Designers; Working with Visual Studio's Productivity Aids; Refactoring Code; Debugging with Visual Studio 2005; The Visual Studio Automation Object Model; Writing Macros, Add-ins, and Wizards; The .NET Community - Consuming and Creating Shared Code
   Part 3 - Visual Studio 2005 at Work: Creating ASP.NET User Interfaces; Building Windows Forms; Working with Databases; Web Services and Visual Studio
   Part 4 - Visual Studio Team System: Team Collaboration and Visual Studio Team System; Managing and Working with Team Projects; Source Control; Work Item Tracking; Modeling; Testing; Team Foundation Build; Index
   
   For someone like me who isn't a .NET developer, I found Part 1 very useful. The intro and tour gave me a great overview of what the IDE offers, and I could easily relate the different parts to the environment (Eclipse) I'm already familiar with. With that background, I could have easily taken Parts 2 and 3 and become productive in relatively short order. The authors maintain a good blend of text to screenshots to code, so I felt like I was getting a combination of reference and tutorial information in one volume. The argument could be made that all this information can be found in the help files, as is the case with most applications. But it's a lot easier to learn a tool like this (at least for me) when there's a structured guide that puts all the information in context. The Unleashed titles do just that, and this one is no exception...



2. I was very impressed with the content found in this book, there was wide coverage of not only the in's and out's of using the IDE, which is an excellent introduction to any beginner, but also great coverage of Visual Studio Team System and the automation model found within Visual Studio allowing anyone to extend the IDE, which is more in line with an intermediate developer. This book is well suited for the beginning to intermediate developer looking to get up to speed with Visual Studio 2005. Great job Lars and Mike.



3. The book has been a disappointment; it assumes that the reader knows almost everything there is to know about the Visual Studio 2005 program, and the explanations are vague, and far and few in between.
   I just wasted valuable money buying this book. I should have checked its contents at the local bookstore first before purchaing it.
   This book is poorly written.



4. This book did a great job of revealing the breadth of features available in the product. I think this book is quite useful to not only those that are just getting started but those that are seriously considering implementing VS/TFS in the organization. Even if you are an experienced user of Visual Studio you will certainly learn several new tricks. In fact, I reference this book with my clients who are interested in rolling out VS and TFS.



5. An excellent book. Lots of examples. Unfortunately, you will have to type in all the code examples yourself as the Sams Publishing web page does not have any downloads even though the back covers says that they are available.

5 comments about Beginning Access 2003 VBA (Programmer to Programmer).

1. I must highly recommend this book by Denise Gosnell. After skimming through about 20 books on the subject at a super bookstore in Melbourne, I decided this book was the best by far. I must admit, I am beginning to become slightly discouraged at the amount of books out there - especially on PHP and MySQL that I decided to bite the bullet and learn Access and Visual Basic programming.
   
   This book gives you great examples and you CAN go to any chapter depending on your current skill level without being thrown on a tangent of fancy techniques and confusing explanations. All I want in a book, is someone to TEACH me through step by step explanations and well thought out sample exersizes. Denise has a wonderful ability to write and keep up your enthusiasm to keep perservering. I highly commend everyone give this book a go and you will see what I am talking about.
   
   Thank you Denise, I look forward to reading some more of you work in the near future.



2. it's a great start FOR SOMEONE WHO KNOWS A LITTLE VBA. I highly do not recommend if for beginners. If you know nothing about vba, variables, sub routines, functions etcetera, I would suggest you start with a Steve Roman book on VBA for Word. The book is a great concept book for beginner understanding of n-tear programming in vba. As far as doing tricks in vba, there are very few examples in this book. The wrok advanced vba should have been the beginner book (to some degree.)



3. I've never coded in VBA. I've always relied on the macros in MS Access to do everything I needed to do. However, I picked this book up to try and learn a few new things. By the time I got through chapter 6, I was writing VBA code like it was nothing.
   
   Incredible text written so the novice user can understand it with excellent hands-on examples and exercies both provide a tremendous self educational experience for the most basic of VBA programmers (such as myself).



4. I took program courses years ago in college and was a very good programmer. However I never ventured into visual language because I found them confusing. This book will get you started. It gives you all the basics. If you have done old basic you need to get past the terminology but the example explain themselves. It give you skill but like any art you need to put it on the canvas. Great book!



5. I am relatively new to programming, but am very familiar with Access. I picked up this book hoping to improve my ability to customize my Access databases, but I've decided to return it to Amazon. The reader is asked to repeatedly try out examples, which is typically followed by a brief, superficial explanation of the code. Often, some of the more complex calculation are simply not explained!
   
   If you are new to programming, do NOT buy this book. If you have any experience with Visual Basic programming, this book MIGHT give you some insight into how to navigate the Access programming environment, but even then it probably will fall short.

4 comments about The Java Tutorial: A Short Course on the Basics, 4th Edition (The Java Series).

1. This book is based on the tutorials available on the Java site, but I found this didn't worry me at all as I read the book.
   
   I have always been impressed with 'The Java Series' of books from Sun and this one ranks well. But while I was prepared to accept a more superficial transfer from the web version, what I got was much nicer. The book includes many important topics that are required to move from 'basic Java' to serious development, and while the collection topics alone is enough to recommend the book, the coverage is a mixture of the basics, advanced, and the "need to know" which impressed me.
   
   The coverage of the very basics is a lighter than in many beginners books so you wouldn't want this to be your only book, but I would certainly recommend it to people who have a grasp of the Java basics, anyone moving to Java from another language, or even if you haven't done much work with Java 5 and would like a decent reference for the additional material.
   
   All things considered, this book has better coverage and more uses to a larger audience than I expected and look forward to having it near me on the book shelf for my future needs.



2. This book is a terrific introduction to the Java programming language. It has been written to coincide with the release of Version 6 of JSE (Java Standard Edition). I had not seen the previous editions of this book, but I was quite impressed with the entirety of this edition. In particular, I really liked the organization. There is a brief chapter that introduces you to the basic recipe of writing Java programs on various platforms, and then the book gets down to business with object-oriented concepts first, before it tackles any other issue. Next it tackles the basics of the Java language specifically - variables, operators, expressions, control flow, classes and objects, and then interfaces and inheritance. This gives the novice an idea of how to do very basic programs in Java that include its object-oriented facets. Next, the more elegant concept of generics is introduced. The book makes it clear not only how to use them, but why you would - they add stability to your code by making bugs more detectable at compile time. Oddly enough, the next chapter is where the author chooses to introduce the creation and usage of packages. This is generally saved to the end of most books, since bundling classes and interfaces into packages is not something that the novice Java programmer needs up front, but it is a well-written and well-illustrated chapter on the subject. Next the author returns to more basic Java topics - numbers and strings, exceptions, and basic I/O. It is hard to do anything meaningful in Java without a grasp of these topics, and the book does an especially good job of explaining the confusing world of Java I/O.
   
   The chapter on the Java Collections Framework is made easier by the previous chapter on generics. The chapter on concurrency is well done, and catches you up to concurrent processing on the Java platform as it exists in Java 5.0 and later. Regular expressions will probably be old hat if you are from the world of Unix scripting, but this chapter does not make any assumptions and explains the concept from the beginning and then how that concept is implemented in Java. Next is an oddly practical chapter on the platform environment that includes issues like system utilities and the PATH and CLASSPATH environment variables that you almost never see published in a book. Usually, you see Swing explained along with exceptions, but since properties and exceptions have already been covered, this makes explaining the complex issue of GUI implementation with Swing a bit easier. The book concludes with chapters on JAR files, Java Web Start, and the ancient topic of Applets, which, after all, is the reason Java was such a hot language in the first place. Appendix B is a handy one on preparing for Java Programming Language Certification, which was not the purpose of this book, but it certainly is a useful tool in this process.
   
   Each chapter concludes with questions and programming exercises to test your knowledge. The book clearly explains each topic, has plenty of good illustrations, and lots of sample programs to illustrate the points being made. If you are a beginning Java programmer, I can't see a better way of picking up the Java language in its most modern form than this book. The following is the table of contents:
   
   Chapter 1. Getting Started
   Chapter 2. Object-Oriented Programming Concepts
   Chapter 3. Language Basics
   Chapter 4. Classes and Objects
   Chapter 5. Interfaces and Inheritance
   Chapter 6. Generics
   Chapter 7. Packages
   Chapter 8. Numbers and Strings
   Chapter 9. Exceptions
   Chapter 10. Basic I/O
   Chapter 11. Collections
   Chapter 12. Concurrency
   Chapter 13. Regular Expressions
   Chapter 14. The Platform Environment
   Chapter 15. Swing
   Chapter 16. Packaging Programs in JAR Files
   Chapter 17. Java Web Start
   Chapter 18. Applets



3. So far I'm on chapter 5 and everything is fine except for inheritance and interfaces I think that the explanations and the examples are confusing, but I do recommend this book.



4. This book is up-to-date and well paced. I recommend it to someone aware of the Java syntax that wants a quick re-cap before getting to the well explained chapters on Classes, Inheritance, Exceptions, I/O, JAR and Java Web Start. On the downside the chapter on collections is a tough read and the last chapter on applets feels like it doesn't belong to the book.

5 comments about Visual Basic 6 for Dummies (for Windows).

1. When I was trying to make the upgrade from Visual Basic 4.0 to Visual Basic 6.0, this was the first book that I bought. This book is very easy to read and there are ample examples to illustrate each principle that the author is trying to teach you. I combined this books with the 4 "Learn to Program Visual Basic" books by John Smiley to give me a solid foundation in Visual Basic 6.0. The cartoons in this book will reduce down the stress of trying to learn something new.

   Now that I am moving into .Net technology, I really appreciate how good this book was for people who have little or no experience with Visual Basic. This should be your first Visual Basic 6 book. By the way, Visual Basic 6 and the legacy source code that goes with it will be around for years to come.




2. I used this book, and found it very helpful to begin writing vb code. The only drawback is that it is of course covers only the basic stuff with very little background info. If you want to get started in VB, I would suggest this book to anyone.



3. I bought this book and quickly discovered that Visual Book 6 is no longer the latest tool for VB programming. Microsoft has introduced Visual Basic 2005--which you can download free from Microsoft.
   
   Consequently, any book on VB6 is really a waste of your time. You would just end up converting your VB6 code to MS VB 2005. Why waste time learning old commands? Go right to the latest.
   
   If you want a great book on MS VB 2005 try Michael Halvorson Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Step by Step.



4. I generally like Dummies books, but this one is a little weak. The book covers a lot of topics but is really short on examples. I went through 90% of it and still didn't feel like I could actually write a meaningfull program. I purchased "Microsoft Visiual Basic 6.0 Professional step by step" by Michael Halvorson and found it to be MUCH better. I'm about 50% of the way through it and have learned a lot more.



5. Having been to school for this subject but never quite understood the workings of this program, this book has been an eye-opener

5 comments about VBA and Macros for Microsoft Excel (Business Solutions).

1. I found this book to be one of the best references for Excel VBA development. The book is easy to understand and follow. Contains a large amount of examples that can be easily understood. Addresses many critical aspects of excel VBA development. Not too much was spent on forms/GUI development so you will have to look elsewhere if you into that. Also addresses interfacing Excel to databases using ADO as well as API programming which is critical for superusers to extend the power of excel without the limitation of data storage. Overall, the authors have a superb job and I consider this book to be an essential of my Excel VBA library!



2. The book is useful. The worksheets downloaded from the Internet are also very clear.
   Sometimes you expect more explanations on statements which use new features not connected with the subject being reviewed.
   I think that I shall not need to purchase any other book on this subject.



3. I am very satisfied with the transaction. The shipment was on time and the product is in good quality



4. Bill Jelen is a brilliant self-promoter. His book is even more brilliant. His newsgroup, MrExcel Message Board Forum at www.mrexcel.com, is an invaluable resource.



5. If I could give 0 stars, I would.
   
   This book is poorly written and poorly edited...and I have the version "Reprinted with corrections." Flipping through it in the bookstore, it seemed promising - enough so that I actually bought it. After three chapters, however, I am ready to throw in the towel.
   
   This is a technical book. It's about programming. It contains examples of actual code. The examples have to be correct to have any credibility. Once you lose that, every line becomes suspect. Let me provide you just a few examples.
   
   On page 32, the colorindex for "yellow" is given as "6"; on page 33 it is "30".
   On page 41, "Selection is actually a property and not an object." When I reach page 50, "Selection" has become an object again.
   On page 62, in the third example within Table 3.1, the delimiting comma is inside the quotes.
   On 67, " Notice that that the offset..."
   Also on that page, the resizing example at the bottom is wrong. If I have a column and add two more to it, I end up with three. Maybe Mr. Excel is using a higher level of math when he says "Range("Produce").Resize(,2) and says "Remember, the number you resize by is the TOTAL number of rows and/or columns you want to include."
   
   What really rolled my eyes back in my head was on page 63, when I encountered .range(.range, range) with insufficient introduction. A relatively simple statement with a single range reference suddenly morphed into a triple range reference with an indecipherable comment about "an extra range at the beginning of the code line." This makes absolutely no sense, and coupled with the authoring or editing miscues mentioned earlier, it is not even possible to determine if this is a typo or simply a badly written passage.
   
   Whether I ultimately can gain any value from this book remains to be seen - assuming I am able to actually make sense of the content. For me, it was a total waste of the purchase price.