Excel 2003 Programming: A Developer's Notebook -- Light on theory and heavy on practical application, this guide takes intermediate to advanced Excel VBA programmers directly to Excel 2003's new features. With the help of dozens of practical labs, you'll learn to work with lists and XML data, secure Excel applications, use Visual Studio Tools for Office, consume Web Services, and collect data with Infopath. If you'd like to work with Excel 2003 but don't know where to start, this book is the solution. Sample Chapter 2, Share Workspaces and Lists, is available free online.

I'm sitting on an airplane having just finished reading Hibernate. It's rare these days to find a book on a new Java technology that you can actually get through on a domestic flight. That this Notebook effectively and succinctly tackles object-relational mapping makes it, and Hibernate, even more impressive. Many books in this category would need to be checked luggage. With this book, you travel first class.

I found it to be a quick and easy read. I like that the book is short enough that I could finish it on this flight--a practical, how-to guide that fits within about 150 pages. It's pretty much everything I'd want to know about how to get started with Hibernate, and quickly.

-- Mike Clark, Independent Consultant and Programmer, Clarkware.com

A Developer's Notebook is just what it claims to be--the often frantic scribbling and notes that a true-blue alpha geek makes when working with a new language, API, or project. It's the no-nonsense code that solves problems, stripped of page-filling commentary that can often serve as more of a paperweight than an epiphany. It's hackery, focused not on what's nifty or might be fun if you've got some spare time, but what you need to simply make it work now. This isn't a lecture, folks; it's a lab.

Frantic scribbling and notes that a true-blue alpha geek makes.

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No-nonsense code that solves problems.

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