Professional ATL Com Programm Ing

It is a very useful book if you already have some experience with ATL and COM but have some questions about those technologies unanswered. The author gives an excellent explanation of almost any aspect of ATL yet assumes the reader is not a complete newbie. The chapters on Object Wizard and on Threading and Marshalling are particularly useful. In combination with PROFESSIONAL COM APPLICATIONS WITH ATL, this book provides a powerful resource for an ATL COM developer!

This is the book targeted for the groups that have understand how COM works and have done some degree of learning. Personally, this is my fourth book on COM and I find it very useful. It's wide and deep coverage in COM data types, smart pointers, interfaces, classfactory, threading and marshaling did help me a great deal in my COM design decision making. For serious ATL/COM programmer, it is one of the book that you would like to read it quite often to find idea in design and programming.

Unquestionably, a strong side of this book is that it is very comprehensive (which is, btw, consistent with his previous books--"Dcom "and "Beginning ATL...") If you work with ATL I'd say this new one is worthy enough to purchase. There are downsides though: he doesn't write very well--that's one, and another is that he sometimes overdoes with comprehensiveness--in the Dcom book he made a few plainly wrong statements--like with Corba providing implementation inheritance, for example. Although, I must add, I bought this brick-book for its ATL content, and this part is ok, except it's a difficult read at times. Finally, someone here mentioned that this book belongs on the same shelf with Brockschmidt, Box, and Petzold. Personally, it pains me to see Petzold mentioned in the same phrase with the other two dim-wits. Grimes doesn't quite make it to Petzold's level. But then, neither is his writing nearly as bad as anything by Brockscmidt (and his goofy koalas). Well, except for the book size, of course . On the yet another hand, I'm not sure ATL is such a great thing--it's MFC all over again, this time--a template-infested version of the same bloatware saga. If you care to really know what you're writing and, btw, make it smaller, faster, and perform according to your wishes (and not to what MS thinks everyone needs) then you might just try to write directly to the Com api, or throw together your own thin helper library. Do not let yourself be lead to believe that you necessarily _need_ ATL. It is an improvement compared to MFC (since you don't need to attach 4meg worth of dlls with every little piece you produce), but still the code it makes is very far from "thin" or "small" .

Richard has done it again! Thanks Richard. I'm one of those souls who lives in ATL everyday. In fact, I work on the ATL team. I'm amazed at the patience it must have taken to carefully unearth the inner workings of ATL. Buy this book. Read the chapter on Threading and Marshaling twice. This book deserves an honored place on your shelf along with Box, Brockschmidt, and Petzold.

No-Nonsense. Just a bunch of useful advice and where all the gotchas! are. (Just the info on implementing connection points clients in C++ saved my days of hairpulling.) You had better know COM, ATL, VB, HTML and C++. Don't bother if you dont have Visual Studio experience -- but if you do, this book is a must. Would like to have seen info integrating with other things COM, such as Outlook, Office and OS interfaces.