Professional ATL Com Programming [Paperback]

Richard Grimes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1998

ATL is the Active Template Library, a set of template-based C++ classes designed for creating COM components. ATL is part of Microsoft Visual C++. This book is for advanced C++ developers with some experience of COM who need to understand how to get the best from the latest release of ATL.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Active Template Library (ATL) provides a powerful way to build efficient Windows components. This clear, hands-on-style tutorial delivers plenty of real programming expertise and can show you how to get the most of out of ATL.

ATL COM Programming starts off with a tour of the basic methods (using C++ templates) used in ATL development, as well as a tour of basic data types, such as strings (or BSTR). After teaching these ATL fundamentals, the book moves quickly into building ATL components, while introducing the basics of every ATL control (such as IUnknown, class factories, and class registration). The book also covers the powers of Visual C++ wizards for building ATL components. Included here are some very useful sections on debugging, error handling, multithreading, and connection points for building event handlers.

Later chapters concentrate on building useful ATL-based controls, whether general purpose or HTML-based components. Everything you need to know to develop components that have custom properties, event handlers, and even custom graphics is in these pages.

Written with the experienced developer in mind, ATL COM Programming shows you where the wizard-assisted development for ATL ends and custom work begins. With its hands-on approach and high level of technical detail, this book makes a good case to be the single most useful volume on ATL programming for the experienced C++ programmer. --Richard Dragan

Review

After the two bestselling books previously written for Wrox on DCOM and ATL 2.1 (Professional DCOM Programming and Beginning ATL COM Programming, respectively), prolific author Richard Grimes hit the shelves again with Professional ATL COM Programming, a new excellent title entirely devoted to ATL 3.0.

To the benefit of the less familiar with the subject, I shall remind readers that ATL, an acronym standing for Active Template Library, is a framework developed by Microsoft to simplify the utilization of COM from the standpoint of C++ developers. The third version of the library comes with the latest release of Microsoft’s most powerful development tool, Visual C++ 6.0, which also includes several wizards to further automate a variety of recurring tasks during COM programming with ATL.

The latest version of ATL, prosecuting on the path set by its predecessors, relies heavily on templates and macros to accomplish the conjunct goals of providing easy reuse of significant portions of boilerplate code while at the same time limiting the overhead in the resulting binaries.

Despite the claim in the preface stating that the ideal reader should already possess some experience of ATL programming before starting to read this manual, the always explanatory style of the author and the presence of detailed refreshers on the basics of C++ templates and ATL’s architecture should be enough to get even the newcomers up to speed. What I really deem mandatory in order to benefit from this book are a good knowledge of the C++ language and of the Visual C++ environment, plus a solid understanding of the key concepts of COM and DCOM programming at the vanilla C++ level. Previous experience with ATL will come in handy nevertheless. Read more --Davide Marcato, Dr. Dobb's Journal -- Dr. Dobb's Journal

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Product Details

• Paperback: 707 pages
• Publisher: Peer Information Inc.; 1st edition (October 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861001401
• ISBN-13: 978-1861001405
• Product Dimensions: 16.7 x 7.2 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,132,326 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Save your money, June 9, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Professional ATL Com Programming (Paperback)

I don't understand where these other reviews are coming from. Surely anyone who has read this book knows that the writing is so poor that it takes hours to glean one tidbit of new knowledge. Even then, there aren't any usable code examples to solidify what you think you may have learned.

Buy ATL Internals instead, it's a much better book, and doesn't cost $60!

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Dry, boring style, January 18, 2000

By 

Stanislaw Pak (New Jersey, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Professional ATL Com Programming (Paperback)

I think sometimes that authors of these books write them because they think that people don't like to read MSDN Library and prefer paper editions. This is partially true. However there is a group of people looking fror something more readable and illustrated that Microsoft's texts. This book has been addressed to professionals who probably have good access to current MSDN Library. Unfortunately, after comparison of some parts of book with original documentation I must say that the companion's documentation is better to read and complete (by definition). Examples presented in this book are sometimes the same as in library and no more. The style of explanation of some details is even worse than reading dry technical specifications. It is the waiste of money.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not very good book, March 13, 2000

By 

Daniel (Israel, Tel-Aviv) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Professional ATL Com Programming (Paperback)

First the book is of 670 pages long and not 800 as advertised in the title of Amazon page. Second the author explanations are not clear and detailed. For instance, he doesn't supply good examples for most difficult concepts of COM ATL like aggregation.