Customer Reviews

Inside COM+: Base Services (Microsoft Programming Series)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I have a lot of books about COM and ActiveX, including "Essential COM", "Inside COM", "ATL internals", "Professional ATL Programming", "Inside OLE", "Essential COM and ActiveX". This is by far the best. It has explained the concept of COM very clearly, with very good examples. As someone say it has many topics similar to the author's "Inside Distributed COM", I think it is because COM+ is based on DCOM concept and Microsoft often change the words.

This book presents the complexities of COM(+) with exceptional clarity. This book deals with COM deepest internals and key concepts are presented in a clear and understandable way. This is "The Book" about COM(+) and I was not suprised that it was the top choice of the: http://www.aw.com/cseng/20thcentbookwinners.shtml

As people have stated below, this is an updated "Inside DCOM" book. Why are they complaining though? It states that on the back cover!! It's true, this book does not go into the nitty gritty of anything specific to COM+. But if you want to know the "Base"-ics then get this book. After looking through many many COM+ books this is easily the winner. No BS. But you need to be a C++ programmer to understand a good deal of it.

Five months ago I read another book by the same authors: Programming Components with MS Visual Basic and I was very impressed. I was able to understand how to program COM from VB! Recently, I read Inside COM+ Base Services. It took me over five weeks to digest it, but then I understood its value. I was suprised to find a reviewer with such strong negative feeling about the authors of these books. Maybe he should not treat this book as a novel but spend some real time trying to understand it.

I have read nearly all the COM books and this one really explains some of the basic infastructure well. The book does, however, focus more on COM/DCOM facilities than MTS/MSMQ type services.

It covers most of the COM important concepts with additional imformation on COM+ very well and in great detail. It covers most of the COM+ base infrastructure and services but not features like BYOT, CRM, Event system and transaction ...

I find this book very useful for learning the why and how COM+ works, but not how to do COM/COM+ programming very much.

It provides the technical foundations of Component Software Engineering. The title is misleading - it is equaly valuable to COM and CORBA programmers. This book takes you from object-oriented to component-oriented and then to distributed components.

This book breaks COM+ into little pieces and makes it look easy. I have a significant amount of books on COM/COM+ and this is definitely the best. I got it at half price but I think that is too much of a bargain.

Note: You must know C++ and a bit of COM to appreciate the value of this book.

It is very seldom to find a book that provides a a scientific foundation to the subject that it describes. I would said that this book legitimizes COM as a mature component architecture. It is probably more valuable to computer scientists than to programmers.

I have read a coupple of books about COM and ATL but this is definitely the best!!! It explains ATL in details from the bottom and up, you don't need any earlier XP to read it and you don't need very much fill in afterwards (except the OLE DB stuff which it doesn't explain at all...)

In fact if you're eager to learn COM it's also probably one of the best books around since it's detailed explenation of COM in the early chapters are very good and easy to understand.

If you're going to learn ATL you probably can NOT manage withouth this piece of paper.

It also does a marvelous job explaining the basics of templates so you don't need any XP from before except C++ and a bit of Win32/MFC programming, but even this is not a requirement since the ATL is so much different from "normal" Win32/MFC programming.