I personally own all these books and have read them, so my views are my own! There are many good books on Excel development and I’ve not read them all. If you buy a book after following one of these links, you will be helping to support this site, thanks. Ross
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VBA for Dummies One of the first books I used when learning VBA. The book I actually have covers VBA in all different applications – the one I link to is just for Excel. These Dummies books are a great way to get into VBA, they start you coding as soon as possible, and give you the detail as you need it. | Highly recommended for beginners from a non programming back ground wanting to start learning and using VBA |
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About Face a book on UI. Alan Cooper is often quoted as the father of Visual Basic, and this book is thought of as a bit of a classic. The book talks about each aspect of how users interact with software. I don’t agree with all of it, but 90% of this book is pure gold. If you’re interested in GUI then also check out Joel and Joel’s Book | Experienced developers wanting to learn more about UI design principal |
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Visual C++ for Visual Basic Developers aimed at VB developers (VB6 and VBA) Bill Locke tries to explain C (although the title is C++, it covers C, and a bit of C# too) to experienced VB developers. He’s successful. I found this book easier to consume than straight up C introductions. | Experienced classic VB devs who want to an introduction to C languages |
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Excel 2002 VBA If you need a detailed explanation of how Excel really works, If you need to know the best way to copy a range to the worksheet from an VB array, if you need to build an application that’s going to work in different parts of the world, this is the book for you! It fits between PED and VBA for Dummies.
Insider tip, the 2003 version of this book was not updated too well (different authors) as a result it’s not quite as good as Excel 2007 VBA |
Folks who wish to get serious about Excel development, and who want to master VBA for Excel. |
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PED. When released this book became an instant classic. It picks right up where “Excel 200X VBA” finish (it’s by the same authors). It goes on to cover, in detail, extending Excel with other technologies (C. .Net, VB6), talks in detail about issues facing real world developmers working with Excel & VBA in the corporate world. Simply brilliant. | Serious developers wanting to gain an understanding of really extending and pushing Excel.
I would also recommend this book to anyone who just loves working with Excel, the first chapter alone is worth the cover price – even is you ever plan to write anything out side of VBA. |
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PED 2. The second edition of PED isn’t just a little update. There where some important changes happening between the first and second editions. The release of Office 2007 (the ribbon!) and extended coverage of .Net technologies are perhaps the most important updates, but the other chapters have been expanded too, the second edition is a full 200 pages longer than the first ed. I was lucky enough to chat to one of the authors of this book just before it was released, see here. | Same as above ;-)! |
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Visual Basic Add-ins A book about writing adding for the IDE. This book was written for the VB6 IDE, which differs quite a lot from the VBA one, as such it not that much use to a Excel Dev, good as it is. | People wanted to extend the VB6 IDE – if there still is anyone wanting to do that! |
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Code Complete 2 This is a brillent book, if you’ve been coding for more than a couple of years, or if you write code for other people at work, just go and buy this book. It’s great, truly great. | Any one who is serious about writing better code – period. |
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When .Net first came out, there wasn’t much about how to use it to program Office. Microsoft .Net Development for Microsoft Office is one of (if not the) first books to do that. It’s not just Excel, and other book have pasted it in terms of keeping update with the tec (VSTO or PED2 – above) but it one of the few places where you can fine detail of some of the less “tempted” methods of working with office from .Net | People interested in working Office and .Net and seeing some ideas that might not be widely know. |
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VB Developer’s Guide to the Win32 API. An important aspect for VBA developers is unserstanding how to make use of API’s. This topic is covered in PED, but this is another good source of information, espically anout graphics API’s – there are some example of using some of these API’s on my web site. | VBA dev looking to get to grips with common API’s. |
