Customer Reviews

Effective COM: 50 Ways to Improve Your COM and MTS-based Applications

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Although useful for revision in certain aspects (e.g. threading issues) of such a rich subject the book is, on the whole, weak. It presents an overly simplistic discussion of the problems of dual interfaces (of which there are many) and a nauseating prosyletisation of the much flawed technology MTS. The section on COM security makes a decent attempt at improving the knowledge of the reader, but fails as the writing is obtuse and laboured.

Save your money, read the COM specification, and experiment. You'll gain a much deeper understanding than that speciously portrayed here.

This is an outstanding summary of diverse COM design and implementation guidelines. This is the only source of information currently available for mastering COM development beyond the basics. The information is presented in extremely concise form making it worth more than ten times its 200 pages. This book is a must for any professional component designer (as any COM developer should be). While not exactly a sequel to "Essential COM", this is in fact the next book to be read. It probably wasn't the main goal of the authors, but their description of security is the most comprehensive ever written so far.

From the general to the specific on topic ranging from MTS to security to IDL, this book contains a set of 50 guidelines that will help any COM developer. Even though the book uses C++ as its' primary language to demonstrate implementation examples, any COM developer will gain a lot by reading this book no matter what language(s) they use (see Item 9 for a great VB code snippet). I only wish the authors wouldn't have stopped at 50 guidelines! (I'll keep my eyes out for "Esoteric COM" ;) )

Jason

Essential COM explains how COM really works but when it comes to specific problem you can't figure out what is the best solution to it. Effective COM goes further and presents good COM programming practices. It also clarifies some material from the former book that has not been explained in sufficient depth or lacks specific examples. However the chapter about security is not sufficient. If you are interested in COM security you must read another excellent book "Programming Windows Security" by Keith Brown.

The team at DevelopMentor has done it again! It's no wonder why their training company is so highly regarded when you look at the quality of information that that team generates! I want to personally thank the each one of these authors for putting together this long-awaited, fine text!

When I'd finished my homework studying Don's Essential COM, reading this text, Effective COM, was a breeze. Effective COM truly helped button down some of the loose ends in my understanding. In Effective COM, the authors present the synchronicity resulting from various COM programming pitfalls. All of the intellectual heavy work has been done and is presented to the reader with clarity and conciseness. Along the way, the attentive reader is presented with many nuances employed by these COM experts. Rarely will you find such excellent coverage in a nutshell! I can not recommend this text anymore strongly!

After reading Essential COM, this book is disappointing. Essential COM may be the best book ever writen on explaining how COM works. Effective COM is very misleading. Many will make the mistake of assuming the author did his homework in writing this book. As an example in point 9 of the book, he suggest that connection points require five round trips and that bidirectional communication can be established in one round trip. Both figures are incorrect. Empirical evidence proves otherwise. In fact, the point he is trying to make is completely false. His suggestion is that callback interfaces can be established faster than connection points. This is completely untrue. If you write an application that follows his model of using callback interfaces, it will be slightly (15%) slower than connnection points.

If you are a COM developer, you must have this book. These guys not only present information that you need to know to work with COM rather than against it, they also tell you how your world will fall apart if you don't follow their recommendations.

The section on security really impressed me (I had a hard time making it through the security chapter in Don Box's excellent first book but this book presented the subject in a way that made it accessible to me.)

In the preface to this book, the authors indicate that this book pays homage to Scott Meyer's "Effective C++." I hope they will continue following that model and give us "More Effective COM."

This book borrow the format that made the Effective C++ popular. It presents 50 tips on COM. Its targeted audience is developers that have been using COM for a while. Prior knowledge of COM is expected for reading this book. In general, it provides very good tips but the only exception is the section about MTS. Maybe the tips are good but I do not know as I have never worked with MTS. That section contains 8 tips of the 50 tips of the book.

This is definitely a great book for those who have already made their first steps in COM programming. The knowledge I gained from this book has an immediate effect on my ongoing work. This book can be used as a checklist for existing and future COM programs how to make them better and avoid some "popular" errors and misconceptions.

This book doesn't lay out the technology, but it explains what works, what doesn't, and why. This is the type of info that's really missing in today's technology manuals. Also, each point basically explaines the technology before going into how it should be properly used. So this is a good read even for those who don't completely understand COM backwards and forwards.

Also, if you're writing code to make a cat or a bird bark like a dog, this is the book.