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 | From Scott Orgera, your About Programming Editor This week we delve into automating both common and advanced Excel tasks using VBA, post to Twitter using Ruby, explore decision making in Perl, discuss JavaScript form processing, and much more... | |
Getting Started Using VBA: The Excel Working Partner
Excel is the Office application that is most frequently automated using VBA. In fact, Excel is where it all began. VBA was first implemented in Excel 5 in 1993. This probably happened for the same reason that the mainline accounting functions were the first to be automated using computers in the 1950's. Numbers and computers just go together. So there is a truly rich programming environment with Excel and VBA! Every Office application (in fact, every VBA hosting application) saves the VBA program in a slightly different way. The actual VBA program is normally saved as part of the hosting application's documents. In the case of Excel, your VBA program becomes part of your Excel workbook.
| How to Tweet From Ruby
Tweeting from Ruby requires a POST request, instead of a GET request. This is almost the same, the only difference is the Net::HTTP::Post class is used and there's an extra step to set the form data. The only form data here is the status field, which is set to the value of the first argument passed to the script. If you're not running this from the command-line, replace this with anything you wish.
| Conditionals: How to Make Decisions in Perl
A conditional is a control structure that will activate specific blocks of your code based upon whether your specified statement (or expression, or condition) evaluates to true or false. You can use these conditional statements to make logical decisions, or take specific actions based on available data. Much like a loop, the conditional statement is a pretty basic structure in Perl and programming in general, and you will find a vast amount of opportunities to use them.
| JavaScript Form Processing
A lot has changed in the way web pages work over the years. One thing that hasn't changed is the usefulness of JavaScript in being able to validate form fields in advance of sending the form to the server, so as to make it easier for the person filling out the form to correct their errors. What has changed is how to best go about doing this. Unobtrusive JavaScript has grown in popularity over the years, since keeping your JavaScript completely separate from the HTML makes both of them easier to maintain and also improves how things work for those users who for one reason or another do not have JavaScript.
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