Customer Reviews

ATL COM Programmer's Reference

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book makes an attempt to be both a reference guide to ATL programming and a tutorial as well, and fails miserably at both. It constantly and throughout the book refers to concepts not explained until leter chapters. The tutorial example is hopelessly complicated by issues unrelated to the topic at hand, and the overall organization will leave you spending more time hunting for the section a particular topic is covered in than would have taken to sit down and read through full chapters in a good narrative.

The book does an excellent job presenting ATL COM and OLE DB, as it relates to ATL COM. I rated this lower though because the editors put the source code available for download, but failed to mention that if you want chapter 5's examples to work you must first load and compile the examples from a previous chapter. The editors also failed to include the access database that goes with the source code. This might be a trend at Wrox, as the editors on several of their recent books have omitted one or more files mentioned or used by the source code.

This book contains good information, and the price is right, but it isn't usable as a reference book. The index is short and incomplete, making finding needed material difficult. Further, when I'm looking up something specific in a reference it is because I have a need to solve a problem immediately. However, there are very few code examples in this book: so much for solving my problem immediately.

As a book about ATL it would have rated 3 stars, as a reference it rates 1.

This is a really handy ATL COM reference book explaining both programming techniques and syntax. At just over 360 pages it is a book to carry around and keep about you all the time while you write your code. It explains the features of ATL 3.0 and how these can be applied to develop your lightweight COM components using Visual C++. However, this is no book for a novice ATL programmer, since it assumes a fair knowledge of Visual C++ and COM. Probably, since the author's aim was to write a handy Programmer's Reference, topics on COM security, IDL, MIDL and compiler COM support have been left out. However this is a very well written, small, handy, consise book on ATL COM programming which you will always want keep around while are developing your ATL COM components.

I really liked Professional Atl Com Programming, so when I found this book and read reviews I decided to check out the source code before purchasing it. The example source code is incredibly primitive. Unicode - non-Unicode issue is totally ignored. Author did not even bother to build all the configurations. It is something average programmer can hack up together in one afternoon. If this book as primitive as the examples, I would not recommend it to any one.