Writing Excel Macros, Steven Roman, O'Reilly, 562pp, £22
The Microsoft Office Integrated Development Environment, powered by Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) has become ultra-sophisticated in recent years. It's no longer enough to be able to record a few macros or do a bit of simple Visual Basic code; it's time to stop floundering in the vast VBA help files and get down to real programming.
Roman pulls no punches: he says that many technical computer books are full of padding and unnecessarily simplistic examples. It's difficult, then, to resist pointing out that Roman himself spends an entire chapter telling us what a program is and that his example Excel programs are less than exciting.
However, this is a good solid introduction to VBA. For me, as a one-time BASIC scribbler, it was a treat to see how much Microsoft has relied on that much-derided language. Roman has a real regard for good oldfashioned programming practices (he hates the impenetrability of much C code for example). The one major pedagogical flaw is that the chapters on the Excel object model and its numerous properties and methods assume a grasp of object-oriented programming.
Given the central role of VBA in all MS Office applications, this is a useful tome, not merely for spreadsheet sophisticates.
Tom Moriarty
Apache The Definitive Guide, Ben & Peter Laurie, O'Reilly, 370pp, £30
Apache is the world's favourite web server. It runs over half the websites on the Net and its share is growing. Not bad going for an open-source program written by volunteers and distributed freely.
Like most open-source programs, Apache has a voluminous manual, written by its creators. One of the authors of this book, Ben Laurie, is in fact a member of the core group that oversees the development of Apache and the documentation that comes with it. So why this book? The preface makes it clear that the book is not a substitute for the manual, stating instead that if the full manual is "a road map that tells you how to get somewhere, this book tries to be a tourist guide that tells you why you might want to make the journey."
One of Apache's key virtues is flexibility and the book walks through its main features, plus the things most users might want to customise. So it moves rapidly from setting up a basic site to keeping two virtual hosts on one computer, CGI and authentication, server-side includes, indexing and security. It's not an easy read, but is well worthwhile for a webmaster who wants to get the most out of Apache.
Fiachra O Marcaigh
Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C, Lincoln Stein & Doug McEachern, O'Reilly, 726pp, £28
Those who find that Apache's built-in flexibility is not enough for them - and who know their way around C or Perl programming - can step right off the deep end with this book. Apache's modular design and clear application programming interface mean that those with sufficient skills can rework a huge range of the server's functions.
Examples in the book include everything from converting image formats, maintaining state and authorisation, to locking robots or other "greedy clients" out of a site. There are lots of code examples and some very neat solutions to the sort of issues that confront webmasters.
The authors are renowned experts in the field. (Stein wrote the CGI.pm Perl module and MacEachern the mod-perl module that allows Apache to use Perl modules in the first place.) So there is no doubting the quality of their advice, and they do quite a good job of making complex material as accessible as possible, but this is a book for the seriously enthusiastic - and expert.
Fiachra O Marcaigh