Rating: 
Summary: Windows Telephony Programming
Review: A review consistent with the book itself:Short Slim Concise Accurate I'd rather have this than the usual 1000+ pp. tome of redundant, inaccurate, off-topic information ...what a pleasant surprise!
Rating:
Summary: Short, Slim, Concise, Accurate
Review: A review consistent with the book itself: Short Slim Concise Accurate I'd rather have this than the usual 1000+ pp. tome of redundant, inaccurate, off-topic information ...what a pleasant surprise!
Rating:
Summary: Windows Telephony Programming
Review: A well written introduction to TAPI. Explains how to get started and the considerations you must make when designing TAPI applications. My only complaint is that too much time was spent describing the author's excellent TFX class library and not enough describing the underlying TAPI API's. This is great if you want to use his class, not so great if you want to develop your own.
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent book that does one thing very well - teach TAPI
Review: Chris has done a wonderful job of providing an introduction into TAPI programming. Most books that discuss TAPI only provide a chapter or two of information mixed in with other topics, but this book provides over 250 pages of nothing but TAPI. Along with a full chapter on writing TAPI Service Providers (TSP's) the book also provides source code to a high level TAPI framework that Chris developed. This is a definate must-have for anybody who is getting started in Windows telephony programming.
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Summary: Excellent coverage of TAPI programming!
Review: Chris removes the mystery surrounding TAPI by methodically describing the programming model. Gives an honest discussion of what TAPI can and cannot do, with lots of sample code. I'm looking forward to a second edition covering TAPI 3 and beyond.
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Summary: A definate must for anyone serious about TAPI development.
Review: I recently recieved Chris's new book and it's chock full on the kind of information that any "serious" TAPI developer needs to know. He gets right to the point with good clear examples. This one is a must have for anyone wishing to learn the ins and outs of TAPI development. And there's even some good info. for the VB developer as well.
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Summary: Far and away the best TAPI book to date.
Review: I've been working with and responding to questions on news groups about TAPI for over four years. As a result I've seen every book as well as reviewed all of the Microsoft information about TAPI. IF YOU ARE GOING TO WORK IN TAPI YOU HAVE TO BUY SELL'S BOOK! There is very little written about TAPI and most of what is written is just rehashed Microsoft information. Sell's does a good job reviewing TAPI versions and history but this book is strongest in terms of having lots of good examples worked through and developed in the course of the book. He does a excellent job at explaining how to use multimedia APIs in conjunction with TAPI APIs. His is the ONLY TAPI book that covers Service provider development (a personal favorite of mine.) In addition he has a very good and detailed discussion of what is to come in TAPI 3.0.
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Summary: simple - this is the secret
Review: if you are c++ programmer who want to learn in short time the basics of tapi, by waliking via good samples, downloaded from the web, with no need to understand what happen behind the scene, this is your book !!! with extra bonus of good framework, to make the developer's life, much more easy. simple - for all people (but good enough for advanced programming). buy it !!!
Rating: 
Summary: Save your money and read the Platform SDK instead
Review: OK, I'll be generous. This book might contain some useful information. I think the main benefit is that it's written in a more relaxed style than the Microsoft Platform SDK, and the author fills in the details a little better than Microsoft. Still, he misses a lot of important points, like (for instance) how to actually get something useful like a serial port file handle out of a telephone connection once it's established. But I give him an extra star for at least trying to write something helpful. Having said that, I think this is a horrible book for learning anything useful about TAPI. The author, for whatever obscure reason, decided to "wrap" the TAPI in his own proprietary C++ wrapper classes, which, according to him, are modeled on MFC. Oops! How are we going to learn to use TAPI from this book when all the examples use the author's pet TAPI classes? It isn't going to happen; at best we'll learn to use the author's version of TAPI, which "of course" (being sample code from a book and all) isn't nearly as powerful as the real thing. This brings me to my next point, which is that all the functions in this book that use realloc() have memory leaks, because the author and technical editor(s) apparently didn't realize that this function won't release a pre-existing memory block if it runs out of memory while it's expanding the block. This kind of sloppy coding irritates me to no end when it's in "sample code" that is likely to be unthinkingly copied by developers! So, in summary, what we have here is a book that theoretically shows developers how to use TAPI, but actually tries to show off Chris Sells' programming skillz. And since his class libraries are basically useless, what we have here is a book that shows developers nothing that the (free) Platform SDK could have shown us. Save your money for something useful!
Rating:
Summary: Save your money and read the Platform SDK instead
Review: OK, I'll be generous. This book might contain some useful information. I think the main benefit is that it's written in a more relaxed style than the Microsoft Platform SDK, and the author fills in the details a little better than Microsoft. Still, he misses a lot of important points, like (for instance) how to actually get something useful like a serial port file handle out of a telephone connection once it's established. But I give him an extra star for at least trying to write something helpful. Having said that, I think this is a horrible book for learning anything useful about TAPI. The author, for whatever obscure reason, decided to "wrap" the TAPI in his own proprietary C++ wrapper classes, which, according to him, are modeled on MFC. Oops! How are we going to learn to use TAPI from this book when all the examples use the author's pet TAPI classes? It isn't going to happen; at best we'll learn to use the author's version of TAPI, which "of course" (being sample code from a book and all) isn't nearly as powerful as the real thing. This brings me to my next point, which is that all the functions in this book that use realloc() have memory leaks, because the author and technical editor(s) apparently didn't realize that this function won't release a pre-existing memory block if it runs out of memory while it's expanding the block. This kind of sloppy coding irritates me to no end when it's in "sample code" that is likely to be unthinkingly copied by developers! So, in summary, what we have here is a book that theoretically shows developers how to use TAPI, but actually tries to show off Chris Sells' programming skillz. And since his class libraries are basically useless, what we have here is a book that shows developers nothing that the (free) Platform SDK could have shown us. Save your money for something useful!
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