Customer Reviews

Professional ATL Com Programming

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

Excellent book, especially the discussion on threading, marshaling, and connection points. This book gets into the guts of ATL so don't plan on reading it in one weekend. It will take a good developer about a week to digest each chapter thoroughly. You will probably end up rereading the book after you gain some experience. Learning COM technologies requires a lot of time and patience and ATL is no exception.

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.

This book tries to cover a lot of ground but does not do a decent job of explaining the material. The author does not write very well and sometimes it is easy to get lost between the lines. I often find myself still wondering what the author tries to say after reading (or pondering) a section for an hour. I think the author is very knowledgable (At least it seems) but he is not a good writer. I will say this book is perfect for someone who has a lot of time to waste. I wish I found a better book before I got this one. I also read Pofessional Dcom book by the same author and I still don't feel comfortable with the material.

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 <g>. 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" <g>.

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.

I highly recommand this book to those who want to really learn ATL. It delves into implementation detail of ATL abit too much though. It is abit less practical than ATL Internals, but is packed with lots of examples to help beginners grasp the atl/com concept.

All in all, this book is definitely worth the money & time to read, but one heck of a boring book to read.

This is a great book but it is a very painful read. I cannot explain why it is but I certainly learned a lot from it but it took a very long time to read it. Examples are fantastic. Other than the fact that it is hard to read, it certainly is another quality product from Wrox. If you are a little confused with this review, you will be even more confused after read this book. Not bed time reading.