Rating: 

I have rarely been so frustrated in trying to understand a subject that I desperately wanted to learn. As soon as the author said there wouldn't be much handholding in the book, I knew I was in trouble. It reminds me of beginning classes I've taken where the professor has apparently grown weary of dealing with the basics and so announces to the class that he wants to treat the class "like a seminar." Beginners don't need a seminar; they need the basics presented in the same old way they've always been presented with plenty of explanation and clear examples that give the student confidence. Mr. Roman is obviously an expert in the subject, but I disagree with his tough-love approach to his readers.

Based on the comments from other reviews here and from an MS Word forum I frequent, my guess is that this book is excellent for people who already have a fair amount of experience in using Visual Basic or other modern programming languages. I'm an old-timer and the language I know is Basic, which is very different from Visual Basic. I wrote lots of WordPerfect macros back in the 5.1 DOS days before Windows, but that experience doesn't seem to help much in understanding the amazingly complex Visual Basic.

I agree with Tarjei's review comment that this book is still selling probably because it's "the only game in town." I searched high and low and couldn't find another Word macro book still in print, which is pretty amazing given Word's dominance. We could sure use a few reader-friendly tomes on the subject.