VB & VBA in a Nutshell: The Language

Why Another VB Book?

VBA is the single most important language for any developer to learn and master. The large numbers of people beginning VB and VBA programming, as well as the enormous number of current VB programmers who wish to deepen their knowledge and programming skills, is attested to by the wealth of published material about VB. Yet, there still is a desperate need for a detailed, professional reference of the VBA language.

There are literally hundreds of books lining the shelves about how to program using Visual Basic or how to use VBA to automate Office applications—seemingly each one promising to teach you more quickly than the rest. But if you're new to VB, you won't learn it overnight, or even in a few short weeks; VBA is a large and detailed language, with hundreds of different functions, statements, and language elements. Furthermore, because the Basic language has been developed over many years (portions even having their origin in Basic and QBasic), and each new version has to accommodate code written using the previous version, you will find that most tasks can be achieved in a number of different ways. There may be the really old function, the not-so-old function, and the brand-new function, all of which achieve a similar result—but which is the old one and which is the new one? Which one should you use? Is the new one really that much better than the old one? This depth of information is where the experience of using a language for many years, through all ...