Customer Reviews

Professional DCOM Programming

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

The book's title is totaly wrong, it should be like DCOM Programming in VC++ with ATL, because that's the only area it focus to, it's good on that though it lacks a lot for being professional, discusess very little DCOM itself.

This book misrepresents itself. It is anything but "Professional DCOM Programming". There is little DCOM, almost no coding outside the spoon-feeding wizards of ATL, and no examination of any of the challenging areas of COM/DCOM.

The book does singularly impress, however, by taking line honours in a very competitive field: by providing the worst explanation of NT security I have ever read.

It is educationally poor, technically unimpressive (despite Dr Grimes attempts to convince us of his expertise with a packet sniffer and a hex editor), and smacks of a quick grab at what at the time was an under-supplied market.

If you want to be expert in any of the fields that this book purports to clarify, I suggest you consult the experts.

This book is very confusing. A lot of high level words without any clue as to what do they mean. COM features are explained extremely poor.

Despite the new buzzword "DCOM" most of the material in the book refers to usual COM. The book is full of listings of sources which take most of the pages and make reading hardly bearable. The author tries to go through many topics (multithreading, NT services) but barely touches each and that makes it unsatisfactory for any professional looking for serious discussion of the subject

This book is very easy. I found no new ideas nor techniques. I'm surprised giving the title "Professional" to this book. This book does not cover to become a PROFESSIONAL. But it is the best book for novices in COM. I think the title of this book should be "Beginning DCOM".

One of the most difficult books I've ever tried to discern. I'm a C and Ingres 4GL programmer who needs to get into Microsoft Visual J++ and DCOM, and this was not the book for me. From the earliest chapters, it seemed that the author was eager to explain everything except how to use DCOM and what the point of it was. Long chapters on alternatives to DCOM didn't tell me much about DCOM. It would have been most helpful to learn how to use DCOM using the typical tools available -- J++, VB6, etc. -- rather than discussions of the internals.

One of the things I like best about this book is its comparison to other object models, but especially to RPC. The examples and experiments are well written and provide much insight. The chapters about DCOM under the hood is simply great!!! Buy it if you want to truly know DCOM.

Dr. Richard Grimes does an excellent job of covering the world of DCOM - automation, security, threading models, NT services as COM servers, MTS, debugging DCOM servers. Everything I need to know about the ins and outs of DCOM is in this book and it is covered in a professional, thorough manner.

Note that Dr. Grimes does not cover the tools and techniques for writing DCOM servers (ATL, MFC, VC++), but it is as well that he shouldn't have - that would be distracting and draw focus away from the more challenging tasks addressed by Dr. Grimes. Tools and techniques should be covered separately (as well they are).

In addition to all of the DCOM architecture, design and implementation gems covered, I use this book exclusively as my "other-than-Microsoft" reference to MTS. In one chapter Dr. Grimes performs a superior effort in coverage of MTS than is done in SAMS' Microsoft Transaction Server 2.0 (Roger Jennings' Database Workshop), a book entirely devoted to MTS.

I look forward to other such efforts of Dr. Grimes being published.

Learning about DCOM is not easy. Yet, the book makes it very likely that almost any reader with some VC++ background can do it. The entire book, starting from first few "backgrounder" chapters and ending with chapters about NT Services, Multithreading, Microsoft Transaction Server, as well as Appendix, is very useful from both theoretical and practical points of view. Dr. Richard Grimes made sure that his detailed explanation of issues is complemented by good code examples. Besides DCOM-specific things, the author explains (not fully covers, though!) many general topics like COM itself, ATL, and COM Threading Models, which might be helpful for readers without solid background in those areas. If you are going to work on design and/or implementation of DCOM-based systems I cannot suggest any better book to read - Professional DCOM Programming really stands out!

I'm using this book to teach myself DCOM, and was very glad I bought from Wrox Press rather than Microsoft Press. The book isn't a substitute for a reference volume, but all the concepts are covered in sufficient (though not excessive) detail. Moreover, there is a refreshing absence of Microspeak. Grimes calls a bug a bug and refrains from describing anything as "cool.". Recommended.