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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THE authoritative text on VB/COM+, August 13, 2000
This is not a book to learn VB from. It is not intended as an introductory text for beginners. However, once you've become a fairly proficient VB programmer, there is no better book on the market to help you become a great VB programmer.This book is to VB/COM+ what Kernighan and Ritchie's book "The C Programming Language" was to C. It is THE authoritative text on best programming practices for VB and COM+. It is not an easy read, but it is packed with more valuable insight per page than any other VB book on the market. I should know because as a professional developer I own a lot of them. It is more "informationally dense" than any other 10 VB books that I own. Beginners and entry-level programmers will probably find it mundane, boring, and esoteric. However, advanced-level VB programmers will find it very informative and quite interesting - at times even captivating as you discover new ways of thinking about VB and the way you program. Just one hint... Don't read too much at one time or your brain will melt. Read a little, think about it, absorb it. Read a little more, think about it, absorb it. Over time, read it all, from cover to cover. If you are just looking for a book with lots of code examples that you can cut and paste into your own real-world applications, then look elsewhere. There are many sophisticated programming concepts that Pattison tries to convey to the reader. To accomplish this, he bases his code examples on a very simplistic "Dog object". The idea is to teach difficult concepts in the simplest possible manner, and I think he pulls it off rather well. This is an "idea book" rather than a "code example book". After providing an overview of COM+, Pattison delves into interface-based programming with topics such as user-defined interfaces and both types of inheritance - interface and implementation. Then he hits the fundamentals of COM, addressing Type Libraries and IDL, VB/COM mapping, object activation and the SCM, direct vTable binding through the IUnknown interface vs. late binding through automation's IDispatch interface, the use of dual interfaces, and marshalling. Just the chapters on interface-based programming and COM alone make this book worth purchasing, but Pattison has barely started. He goes on to discuss the finer points of building and designing servers (DLLs), from design issues to error-raising, the versioning of components in COM, and the creation of user-defined interfaces. After going through the ins and outs of working with configured COM+ components and the sharing of resources within a COM+ application, he talks extensively about COM+ transactions and the many considerations of creating components for IIS and ASP. He finishes up with the topics of asynchonous messaging, COM+ security, and the design of scalable applications. Like I said before, this book is informationally dense. As a professional Internet developer and architect that works for one of Atlanta's top technology consulting firms, it is the only VB book I own that I consider invaluable and to which I refer repeatedly. Fortunately it comes with a complete ebook version of the text that I keep installed on my laptop. I highly recommend this book to good VB/COM+ programmers that want to become great VB/COM+ programmers.
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