Learning VBA

[Lars-Eric Gisslén]

Malcolm,

Naahh, I use pointers only when I need to. If I'm forced to/must use
pointers I use them, otherwise not. Until last spring I was the president of
a programmer user group. I did a lot of low level programming for many of
the member companies in the user group. Many of the 'dirty' jobs was down to
memory management, creating your own heap and manage the memory by your
self, plenty of pointer artithmetic, pointer type casting, bit shifting and
all that stuff. One job I had was communicating with hardware that delivered
the data in variable number of bits and packed data. Getting the data out of
one huge bit stream was only a lot of pointer artithmetic, bit shifting,
pointer type casting and pointer referencing/dereferencing. It was the kind
of code you write ones and then never touch it again. If you go back and
look at the code a few month later you have no clue about what the code is
actually doing (line by line). My oppinion is that you should never go down
to a lower level than you have to. There is no idea of writing fancy code
just to show others what you are capable of. You mostly just end up in code
that will become very hard to maintain and sometimes a nightmare to debug.

My motto is to keep the code as simple and readable as possible. That will
really be rewarded when the day comes when you have to go back and maintain
your code, independent of which development tool you use.

But I think there is something else for VBA newbees to learn before they
tries to understand some pointer basics. That is how to structure the code
and break it down to manageable and maintainable pieces.

Regards,
Lars-Eric

 

[Klaus Linke]

One day I may write something for my web site...

There are some examples in the "VBA Developers Handbook":
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/e...ingdynamicdatastructuresusingclassmodules.asp

BTW, I loved the books by Kernighan, Ritchie et al, too. Never did much C
programming, but I often use the "tool-box" approach of simple utilities
that you can string together for my VBA macros.

Klaus

 

[Word Heretic]

G'day (e-mail address removed) (Malcolm Smith),

<Pouts>

Not even my works of fart :-(


(e-mail address removed) (Malcolm Smith) was spinning this yarn:

Frankly I wouldn't. Well, not on VBA as there isn't one that I like.
After a while I would get Ken Getz' "VBA" which is advanced work and is
published by Sybex.

Depending on how much programming knowledge I would offer different
answers. But, basically the issue isn't learning to know how to program
in VBA for a lot of people but learning to program first.

For beginners I would tell them to locate a fine VB book. For those who
have done some programming I would tell them to pick up a free C compiler
and the excellent 'Kerninghan and Ritchie' book on C.

Why? Simply that the VB/VBA successfully hides the operation of pointers
from the programmer. And I feel strongly that for the programmer to
understand what's going on behind those Set statements in VB/VBA a little
messing about with pointers is essential.

Other than that. Stick with this newsgroup and the others with 'vba' in
the tite. Try to answer every question in your head and learn from the
answers.

Have a look at the MVP site, have a look at my meagre site at the code
examples.

I think that these are miles better than any book. Even if there were a
book which I would or could recommend.

Hope that this helps
Malc
www.dragondrop.com

Steve Hudson

Word Heretic, Sydney, Australia
Tricky stuff with Word or words for you.
Email (e-mail address removed)
Products http://www.geocities.com/word_heretic/products.html

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