[AccessD] More Class lectures?

Tina,

You are welcome.

I am not exaggerating when I say that classes, collections and events are the most important things 
that a VBA programmer can learn once they have the basics down.  Any programmer who has learned 
these things will back me up there.

Back in about 1981 or so, I was a technician, fixing very sophisticated graphics terminals.  I was 
(still) struggling to learn programming, just out of curiosity.  I ran across the old basic Star 
Trek program that ran on a Data General mini computer that my employer used for my repair 
workstation.  My workstation only had 16 Kbytes of RAM and the program wouldn't load, so I started 
digging in to try and see if I could make it shorter so it would load.

To be honest, I have no idea whether the version of basic had such constructs, but this program was 
written with no subroutines.  EVERYTHING was a GoTo LineNumber.

I printed the program out on the old teletype yellow roll paper, laid it on the floor, and started 
drawing lines from the GoTo statement to the target line number.

That experience gave a whole new meaning to the phrase "spaghetti mess"!!!

I never did rewrite the program, frankly it was waaaaay above my ability at that time.  However... 
shortly thereafter I purchased Turbo Pascal.  Turbo Pascal was the holy grail of programming in 
those days (for us micro computer people anyway) precisely because it taught (forced in some cases) 
good programming practices and it had functions and subs, parameters and all that stuff.  Man was 
that a cool language, to me anyway.  I learned Turbo Pascal with a vengeance and was soon writing 
some really cool (to me) applications.

Somewhere around the late 80s, Turbo Pascal added classes.  Woaaa, VERY different and tough for me 
to understand, but I persevered.  So I was using classes long before I got to Access.

Then I came to Access and Event Driven Programming was staring me in the face.  Woaaaa, VERY 
different and tough for me to understand.  Coming from a "start here and trace your way through the 
code" mentality, it was just very difficult to wrap my mind around events interrupting my already 
running code.

Again to be honest, I haven't a clue whether Access 2.0 had classes (though I doubt it) but I had so 
much to think about in learning the whole event driven / visual development environment that I kind 
of lost track of classes.  From 1994 to somewhere around 2001 I used the various versions of Access, 
but I was no longer using classes.  Kind of sad when I think about it.

Then Shamil started knocking on my head espousing events, but I wasn't really picking up on the 
"class" side of it yet.  So it took me about TWO YEARS to finally "get" whatever it was I needed to 
get to understand classes in VBA.

I do NOT want you guys to go through what I went through with that.  I am determined to make this 
stuff easy enough that ANY programmer that is already proficient with VBA, that understands how to 
use the objects like forms, recordsets etc. that ANYONE that can do that stuff can learn classes and 
events in a few easy lessons.

I want you to GET that you CAN!  And I want to write it in a simple enough, easy to learn, bite size 
format that you can just start at the beginning and be programming classes in a few days or weeks.

You CAN, if I can do my part right!  My part is to write it in simple enough terms, and small enough 
chunks.  Your part is to take the time to study the chunks, ask questions and give me feedback to 
make the lectures better.

John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com


Tina Norris Fields wrote:
> Hi John,
> 
> Because of family health issues, I have spent little time on AccessD - 
> so I am coming late to this.  I will dig into the class lectures because 
> I need to know this stuff and you really do a great job of presenting 
> it.  Thank you, thank you, thank you. 
> 
> Tina