Rating: Summary: A very good way to jump into TAPI Review: With both this book and the downloadable source in hand, TAPI becomes very approachable. The only other book on TAPI I've seen is Microsoft's, and that one is horrible (sorry Microsoft). Chris takes time to show the details of TAPI, and then abstracts it with his TFX class library. It is very good stuff and very well documented code.Despite Chris's opinions of short, focused books, however, I'd like to see this book expanded to include 1) a better discussion of TAPI's event handling (I think this is just a problem with the way TAPI is structured, with all of the low-level callbacks), and 2) some more in-depth discussion of conference calls, transfers, etc. These are glossed over since support for them is thin, but I'd still like to see some more writing about this sort of thing. An excellent book, Chris; I probably would have never really gotten into TAPI without your instruction.
Rating: Summary: Sample code doesn't build... Review: With VC6, the sample code doesn't build out of the box and the author isn't forthcoming with addressing the problems. Some header files are missing and yet all you can get from the author is that the code was built with VC5 and needs re-writing for VC6 (which is not true, btw.) The guy didn't bother to include any build comments in the book and doesn't want to be bothered now.
Rating: Summary: SDK docs plus maybe 10% of questionable extras Review: Yes, it is true that there aren't other books on TAPI. But that doesn't make this book good though--most of it is a close rehash of the Windows docs that come with the SDK and MSDN. Plus some obligatory Microsoftish junk about dangers of multiple inheritance. Plus a few unfunny jokes. Plus a bit of trivial MFC'ish code. A few illustrations do clarify the dry and ungrammatical SDK text, but not by much. Overall, I set this book's value at $3.39, which I bet you'll be able to get it for in a couple of months from your favourite remainers store. Of course, then you won't need it as it'll be completely outdated.
|