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Summary: Extreme ATL programming made easy by Brent and Chris - COOL
Review: I've seen some preliminary drafts, and I've got to say that this book is going to be the bees knees for learning the dirty details of the Active Template Library (ATL). Chris and Brent are (always) technically accurate and present the information in a well written, easy to understand manner. Put it this way, I'm going to buy it and I'm the ATL Development Lead!
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Summary: The must get book on ATL
Review: I have been programming ATL for the past 4 months. So far, the best introductory books I find are those from wrox press but ATL Internals addresses a lot of issues that are not covered in other books (which usually concentrates on wizard driven code). This book discusses a lot of the quirks in the design of ATL and the chapter on Smart Data Types alone helped me detect a lot bugs in my own code. As a programmer, I find that ATL is poorly documented and poorly designed in certain cases. This book will give you insight into a lot of these issues.
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Summary: Users of Visual Studio .Net beware...
Review: If you are limiting your development to Visual Studio 6.0, then this book is the perfect text for learning ATL 3.0; a five-star book all the way.On the other hand, if you are using Visual Studio .Net with ATL 7.0, then I would advise borrowing this book from a friend or buying it used. 75% of the information contained carries over to ATL 7.0, but the other 25% has a few gottchas. For example, the authors mention a suite of undocumented ATL classes for the Windows controls (CButton, CListBox, etc.), but these classes have been removed from ATL 7.0. OUCH! It *is* tempting to use them! :^) There are also a lot of new classes added to ATL 7.0 that could use the explanatory skills of Mr. Rector, et al. I give this book a three-star usability rating with ATL 7.0, therefore, the four-star rating over-all. This is a good book that is in need of an update-a fate shared, sooner or later, by most computer books. I hope the authors and the publisher have a new one in the works.
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Summary: The only "wizards" are the authors
Review: Ahh, what a joy to read and re-read. Well organized, inciteful and clearly written. Gets into the core of ATL without being boring or obtuse. I started by reading Appendix A which does a nice job in explaining some of the fundamental concepts of template based design ATL leverages. With this firmly in mind, the book and ATL design finally made sense. ATL is a beautiful thing, baby. Though, not A COM book in the classic sense, many COM topics finally crystallized for me when viewed thru the prism of ATL implementation. The chapter on implementing collections with ATL was especially inciteful and was indispensible in building STL-based "on demand" collections of objects. My only small complaint was the lack of coverage on OLE DB consumers and provider support, but hey, after reading this book, I think I may be able to figure it out. C-ya at ATL DevCon I!
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Summary: This is a six star book
Review: ATL internals is the final word on ATL. No other book is needed to master ATL. I have a good number of books on COM and ATL but getting the low down on ATL starts and ends in this book. The coverage in unbeleiveable. It will make you think you were part of the ATL implementation team.
This book is not a short cut for learning COM programming.You should have a good understanding of how COM works and you also need to know your c++ well(emphasis on well. This book does not teach c++)
However, considering the .NET revolution, ATL may not be of much use for much longer.But if for some reason you need to learn ATL, this book is the ATL University.
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Summary: Don't do ATL or COM without it
Review: This is simply one book that you do not want to be without when designing and implementing a COM project. I purchased the book after I found myself in my first COM project and without any coworkers with any experience in this area. As a comment, I've also rummaged around the Internet and purchase ...books in the effort to come up to speed as quickly as I can. ATL Internals is the best source of data on ATL that I've found so far. ATL Internals not only discusses ATL but also does and excellent job discussing COM's theory of operation and how a Win32 OS supports COM. As a warning, however, ATL Internals isn't the only book that you need on a COM project because it is specialized on ATL (and on COM in general). While ATL is useful it is not the only thing that you will have to deal with on a COM project. You will probably need to work with IDL files and for that I can unequivocally recommend "Essential IDL" by Martin Gudgin. ATL Internals accomplishes several things well; I will try to describe the most valuable aspects of this book. One of the best properties of this book is that it is thorough. It covers ATL in depth. The following is a partial list of the material in ATL Internals: 1) ATL Internals covers using the wizards and explains how to proceed beyond the point where the wizards quit.
2) A though discussion of ATL facilities. For example: CComPtr (a COM smart pointer), CComBSTR (a class wrapped around the error-prone BSTR datatype) classes are covered in detail. The text conversion macros are completely covered here. In other books and on the internet I saw code examples that used them but will little explantion.
3) Bug warnings, both your (potential) bugs and bugs within ATL. The authors point out the buggy parts of ATL and they invest the necessary effort to warn out about aspects of ATL that, if naively used, create bugs. Numerous pages are dedicated to showing both how to correctly use certain hazardous parts of ATL as well as examples of buggy code. Depreciated techniques are also described for completeness.
4) Discussion and examples of various COM issues, including threading issues, connection points, the Service Control manager (SCM)and so on.
5) Detailed discussion of the numerous macros that Microsoft uses to conceal substantial code, (e.g. BEGIN_OBJECT_MAP, COM_INTERFACE_ENTRY_IMPL, etc.)
6) One of the appendixes shows a cross reference between ATL classes and header file names. This was a welcome convenience (yes I could have greped, but this is quicker) ATL Internals not only has great content but it is written in a very readable style. The typeset is easy to read and the diagrams are well done.
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Summary: The best book for understanding what's REALLY going on
Review: I first bought this book because it was the only one I could find that had a discussion of ICollectionOnSTLImpl that I could understand. I was already fairly familiar with ATL - at least how to use the wizards - but found that a lot of the documentation that was available was less than useful, especially the collections stuff. After successfully using Chapter 7 (Collections & Enumerations) for what I needed, I went back and read the whole book from front to back, and started really to understand what was happening under the covers - the whys and wherefores for all of the seemingly quirky little code chunks that I had seen peppered throughout my code, but not understood fully. This book has become an indispensible resource, that I keep close at hand. I can't really recommend it as a first book on COM or as an introduction to ATL, but this is not a criticism, because that's not its intended purpose. For in-depth coverage of the workings of ATL, though, I haven't come across a better book.
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Summary: Essential
Review: Takes the background established by Don Box's "Essential COM" and shows the low level why and how of ATL. If you want to know what DevStudio's wizards are doing for you, get this book. It will help you interpet the Wizard-generated code. The author was responsible for producing ATL, and he can write well too! This book is NOT like Myers' applied C++ books, it does not apply ATL to any problems of note, it just very lucidly explains what ATL does for you and most importantly, the caveats!
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Summary: A great book for ATL
Review: If you are a COM C++ developer, this book is great and it answer a lot of your questions. However, it is not for COM beginners. If you are a beginner, definitly buy Essential COM (by Don Box).
After reading Essential COM, you should own this book. It is excellent to learn ATL and as a reference too.
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Summary: Philip Leitch
Review: This is a truly great book. It gave me all the answers I was looking for, and I was looking for a lot of answers. The section on strings (windows strings) CComBSTR is indispensable (chapter 2). I can't understand how people could rate this book badly - I tried the rest and this was the best. The only down side, as I see it, is that the book is rather dry. Then again, if you expected anything other than a dry book you shouldn't be looking in non-fiction computer books. Humour was used but it was sarcastic and rather dry - quite frankly it should have been left out completely. The book was VERY full on, presenting vast quantities of information very quickly, with enough information to make things clear.
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