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Title: Inside COM (Programming Series) by Dale Rogerson ISBN: 1-57231-349-8 Publisher: Microsoft Press Pub. Date: February, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $34.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.34 (91 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Perfect, Almost
Comment: A great look at COM under the hood. The style is clear and friendly, and the code is very well-written and documented. The author starts the first chapter with an excellent introduction that establishes the merits of COM as a component technology as well as the benefits of component-based programming. The following chapters continue with the development of COM Components from DOS command line programmes to fully-working COM Dll's.
One of the great things about this book is how the author endeavors to explain the cryptic and confusing terminology of COM. I especially enjoyed the explaination of the concept of COM Apartments, which is the best treatment of the subject that I came upon to date.
One has to keep in mind that this book is about COM, and just that. Active X controls are barely touched upon. ATL is not used at all. Instead the author builds his own light-weight library of classes, and that is the only drawback to the book that I can see.
It's a great book for understanding the enternals of COM, but you'll probably need another to cover ATL, which is largely the standard library for writing COM and Active X components in C++.
Rating: 4
Summary: Good fundamentals but insufficient examples
Comment: Like other reviewers, I found the book excellent at explaining the fundamentals. Where it falls short is in providing meaningful examples. Most of the book is spent implementing three tiny, do-nothing interfaces. Then, in the last chapter he gives a full blown application that is supposed to bring it all together. With quite a bit of study, it is possible to go from this example to a component-based program of our own. It would be a lot easier if there were more meaningful examples of proposed solutions to make the concepts more concrete. For example, in the chapter on IDispatch and dual interfaces, Rogerson suggests that C++ programmers should provide a low level interface _and_ a dual interface that makes use of the low level interface. He seems to imply that this should be done through aggregation or containment. Since dual interfaces are so common, a nice example would have been useful. I'm still waiting for a good book on practical applications of components, akin to Professional Visual Basic 5 Business Objects, only in C++, possibly even ATL.
Rating: 5
Summary: The best way to *really* understand the fundamentals of COM
Comment: This book begins by assuming the reader knows little more than basic C++. In the second chapter it introduces some simple C++ classes about which the reader will think to herself, "okay, this is simple". From there it builds: adding incremental changes to the original C++ code, gradually making it more useful, explaining each change as it goes. By the end of the book, the original example has grown up into a full fledged COM component, written completely from scratch. No wizards, no templates. At this point the reader will not only be able to recognize the elements of a COM component, but more importantly, she will understand *why* COM works the way it does. The mystery surrounding the ATL and Visual Studio wizards evaporates, and the developer can see them for what they really are: simple shortcuts.
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Title: Essential COM by Don Box ISBN: 0201634465 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 22 December, 1997 List Price(USD): $44.99 |
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Title: Developer's Workshop to COM and ATL 3.0 by Andrew Troelsen ISBN: 1556227043 Publisher: Wordware Publishing Pub. Date: April, 2000 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
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Title: Understanding Activex and Ole by David Chappell ISBN: 1572312165 Publisher: Microsoft Press Pub. Date: 15 January, 1996 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Essential IDL: Interface Design for COM (The DevelopMentor Series) by Martin Gudgin ISBN: 0201615959 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 15 December, 2000 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Inside Distributed Com by Guy Eddon, Henry Eddon ISBN: 157231849X Publisher: Microsoft Press Pub. Date: April, 1998 List Price(USD): $44.99 |
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