Using Visual Basic with AutoCAD

Rating:
Summary: A straight forward guide.
Review: Andrew Roe's book provides experienced AutoCAD users with the right amount and complexity of material to start creating visual basic programs for many useful tasks. It is very well targeted to beginning visual basic developers that are already familiar with AutoCAD. This allows the book to bypass redundant and tiresome sections on basic CAD skills and get right to the meat of VB and VBA programming. The sections on crossing application boundaries, while very basic, are especially useful. I would recommend this book to all cad users and managers who need a succinct text to help them begin implementing Visual Basic in their offices.

Rating:
Summary: For VB beginners only
Review: Overall a great book for VB beginners. A good guide when used with the "sparse" Autocad online help. This book is geared toward cad administrators and not people new to Autocad. The book only covers the very basics and really needs an advanced section. I think the price was a bit steep and should be along the 25$ range for so few pages. This book gave me a good start writing VB-Autocad apps, the rest I filled in the blanks. I wonder if the weak online documentation about VB in Autocad was due to Autodesk's book. I hope someone writes a complete book with a little theory about the most efficient way to use Visual Basic to access and manipulate information/elements in Autocad. This book did have easy to understand information available nowhere else for getting started with VB for Autocad.

Rating:
Summary: Great for the beginning VBA programmer.
Review: This book provides a good base for someone starting out programming AutoCAD with VBA. It assumes you know AutoCAD, but have only limited experience with Visual Basic. It provides some helpful examples on exchanging data with other VBA-enabled products, such as those in Microsoft Office, and also shows you how to "drive" AutoCAD with stand-alone VB. A few more complex applications would have been helpful, but it will definitely get you up and running.

Rating:
Summary: Basic introduction, not enough examples, not a good referenc
Review: This book was not the reference I was looking for. It introduces how to use visual basic for autocad and then goes into how to interface excel, word, and other applications with autocad. It fails to give examples of complex object manipulation in autocad and just gives one or two paragraph explainations of some of the most complicated and important methods. I also found the index to be too sparse. It just didn't give enough examples of complicated procedures in autocad and I would think this is what most people want to know about. All in all a disappointment.

Rating:
Summary: A good start at using Visual Basic with AutoCAD
Review: While this book was a very good start, I was fairly dissappointed with where the book stopped. I was really looking for more complex object manipluation with AutoCAD objects, and the book being only 400 pages long gives half of its focus to interacting with Microsoft OLE. If anyone is looking to become a real Visual Basic programmer with AutoCAD, I would recommend this book, but only as an accompanying text to a more complete book. Users should beware that the sample files do not reflect standard object naming conventions. There are some very good and useful exercises that I have gone back to as a reference. In short, this book is very useful.