Rating: 
Summary: Excellent for anyone new to COM!
Review: This is a great book for any VB developer who is just getting into COM. I am already fairly familiar with COM, but I still enjoyed reading this book to help fill out with what I already know. This book is very readable, and I recommended it to several of the developers on my team. Anyone who has seen Thomas Lewis give a workshop in person will recognize that same inspirational, enjoyable style in this book.
Rating:
Summary: Well done
Review: Thomas Lewis does an excellent job of choosing which things to say and which things to assume that a person already knows, by the time they are reading a book on COM. Those things that he wisely includes were well documented along with grpahics of exactly how to do it. The approach is a chained sort of approach, with each topic leading into the next, rather than the often used complexity approach, where a top view is given, and then more and more examples. I almost rated this a four instead of a five because in chapter two and again in chapter four he told how to do something without telling why a person would want to do it, apparently forgetting for just a moment that he was writing for a beginning. However, the rest of the book does not contain that mistake, so I lighted up.Overall the book is very well written, there are coding examples, but not so many that you can't remember all of the code so that you don't actually have to enter it to see what is going on. It reads almost as well as a novel, and is easy to follow, yet introduces a person to one complex concept after another.
Rating:
Summary: Well done
Review: Thomas Lewis does an excellent job of choosing which things to say and which things to assume that a person already knows, by the time they are reading a book on COM. Those things that he wisely includes were well documented along with grpahics of exactly how to do it. The approach is a chained sort of approach, with each topic leading into the next, rather than the often used complexity approach, where a top view is given, and then more and more examples. I almost rated this a four instead of a five because in chapter two and again in chapter four he told how to do something without telling why a person would want to do it, apparently forgetting for just a moment that he was writing for a beginning. However, the rest of the book does not contain that mistake, so I lighted up. Overall the book is very well written, there are coding examples, but not so many that you can't remember all of the code so that you don't actually have to enter it to see what is going on. It reads almost as well as a novel, and is easy to follow, yet introduces a person to one complex concept after another.
Rating:
Summary: A excellent introduction to how COM & VB work together.
Review: VBCOM by Thomas Lewis provides an excellent insight to the how VB programmers can use the power of Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) to develop robust components for todays distributed applications. This book is really aimed at beginners/inexperienced programmers who are just starting out with VB, but is also very useful to experianced programmers like me who just want to know more about COM, as it provides information and documentation that just can not be found in the VB on-line help. The book gives the reader an excellent introduction to COM, and then goes on to discuss DCOM, ActiveX control and MTS development, giving tips on how these technologoies are best used. The book also has a good chapter on the future of COM, otherwise known as COM+ & DNA (Distributed interNet Architecture), so you also get an insight into Windows 2000, and Microsofts visions for the future of distributed component development. By the end of the book you will appreciate how important a good understanding of COM is for really successful VB development, and how COM is actually very simple yet so powerful once you understand the basic concepts such as components, interfaces & coclasses. Looking forward to the next book in the series. Rich. VB/C++ Programmer.
Rating:
Summary: Good introduction to COM
Review: Very good book to introduce into the complex field of COMs. In my 7 yrs of programming, this book actually explains the subject of COMs in a very easy to understand manner.
Rating:
Summary: Good introduction to COM
Review: Very good book to introduce into the complex field of COMs. In my 7 yrs of programming, this book actually explains the subject of COMs in a very easy to understand manner.
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