Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book!
Review: If you really want to know what COM and COM+ is all about, this book is for you. I've tried some other COM books before that one, but still had hard time to understand the topic. It has a lot of real life examples and most of explanations are very clear. The only problem is that code from the book must be slightly edited some times to compile. Plus I found some typos. But still-EXCELLENT BOOK.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent COM starter and reference
Review: Out of the last 6 COM books I've read over the past 3 months, this is by far the best and helped to clarify concepts in the others. I'd recommend this highly as a 1st COM book. Makes an excellent reference as well. The book is organized in a very logical and progressive manner that makes it not only helpful, but interesting as well. All concepts are made very clear, and plenty of other references are provided. I could actually start a COM project after reading this one.
Rating:
Summary: He is a real teacher !
Review: Think about it. If you have a knowledgeable teacher who does not know how to teach you whereas you have a normal teacher who does know how to teach you. Who would you choose ?
I will choose the latter. The author of this book has both characteristics I have mentioned. He knows what his readers think when they read to a particular sentence.
For instance, when the book discusses Variants data type, most readers dont care much about Unions therefore they need further explanation about it. He does.
I can point out a numbers of times he know the problems of the readers.
To sum up, the books and author are incredible.
The next are Don Box's,Dale Rogerson's and Brent E. Rector's, Chris Sells's.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent tutorial plagued by many text omissions
Review: This book helped me to get up to speed on COM programming veryquickly. The topics discussed were made easy to understand andremember. The biggest problem with the book is that in thestep-by-step code examples, usually several steps are left out of eachone. This is confusing and frustrating but good for your debuggingskills...
Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written but sloppy production
Review: This book is beautifully written. Very clear explanations. A nice logical flow and obviously the author knows his subject well.
However, the production of the book is awful. In the text there is code that is missing. In order to solve the problems in building the examples, I downloaded (ftp) the code from the book site. Some of the downloaded code refused to compile due to missing lines. When finally it compiled and built, it refused to run giving "Invalid class string" errors. It is such a shame that such a good book is flawed in this way.
In spite of all this, the text is clear and explains the horrors of COM software well.
I am glad I bought it.
Rating: 
Summary: Needs work.......
Review: This book leaves a lot to be desired. First it has numerous mistakes. Second the title of the book is way misleading. You will not learn COM from this nor will you even come close as this book is way too general. IMHO this book is a complete waste of money. Granted that it will probably take 3 or 4 books to get COM down but this book deosn't aid you in anyway. The author's idea of laying the foundations of COM is walking you through an example where he leaves out explainations to the point that you can't create your own COM servers without a great deal of additional references. This book is not for C++ developers, its for analysts who need to evaluate technological alternatives or, perhaps, Visual Basic programmers who don't need the underlyings of COM just a high-level overview. In other words this book is of no help to C++ software engineers. Instead check out "Inside COM" or "Essential COM".
Rating:
Summary: Needs work.......
Review: This book leaves a lot to be desired. First it has numerous mistakes. Second the title of the book is way misleading. You will not learn COM from this nor will you even come close as this book is way too general. IMHO this book is a complete waste of money. Granted that it will probably take 3 or 4 books to get COM down but this book deosn't aid you in anyway. The author's idea of laying the foundations of COM is walking you through an example where he leaves out explainations to the point that you can't create your own COM servers without a great deal of additional references. This book is not for C++ developers, its for analysts who need to evaluate technological alternatives or, perhaps, Visual Basic programmers who don't need the underlyings of COM just a high-level overview. In other words this book is of no help to C++ software engineers. Instead check out "Inside COM" or "Essential COM".
Rating: 
Summary: Good book, but you have to type
Review: This book provides a good introduction to COM, and is very clearly written. It is also more carefully written than most computer books I've seen lately, with relatively few typos.The biggest problem is that there's no CD-ROM included. The source code is supposed to be on the author's web site, along with omitted code samples that he frequently alludes to, but as of this writing, there's NOTHING on the web site. Buyer beware.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Review of COM and Introduction to COM+
Review: This book really clarified a lot of questions for me about COM+ and even MTS. I also found it to be an excellent review of C++ COM programming. Alan Gordon explains the COM+ rationale for stateless objects and creating/releasing database connections _within_ methods. Alan also discusses the advantages and disadvantages of in process and out of process servers, the complexities of COM threading and the concept of COM callbacks. I found this book to be very well written and helpful.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Book to Read
Review: This is a Excellent book, It covers lot of C++ examples.
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