Rating: 
Summary: A fairly good overview of COM+
Review: A Microsoft press book,essentially highlights the advantages of COM+.But then noever else can one get such comprehensive information of a Microsoft product.Go for it.
Rating: 
Summary: 5 Stars if you're new to this Stuff
Review: After reading some of the reviews I see that others feel much as I do, this book is great for beginners and it doesn't hurt for the COM gray hairs.... Although the book is updated for COM+ that alone does not justify someone who already has experience with VB & COM to buy this book. However if you're new to COM and/or COM+ and have little experience in either this book is a valuable asset to have on your desk. Contrary to some of the other reviewers, I thought this book was a breeze to read, a couple of train rides to work is all it took to get a great refresher on VB COM+ and along the way I learned a few interesting tricks. One chapter in this book is worth Gold if you're a beginner or intermediate programmer, Chapter 2 on understanding interface based programming is a must for anyone of you who does not know what interface based programming is or has not done it in VB. If you're a VB programmer and want to kick your skills up a notch then get this book and look at it every now and then, you'll feel a lot smarter at architecture reviews for sure... ALSO, contrary to some of the other reviewer's opinions, this book has some great examples, I felt it had the perfect balance between samples and prose, the examples are concise and get right to the point to teach you what this stuff looks like. I recommend this to anyone but the VB COM+ gurus out there in la la land...
Rating:
Summary: One of the BEST Technical Books I Have Ever Read
Review: As professional windows and asp programmer, and an MCSD, I found this book to be one of the best reads in the technical field I have ever picked up. After I was done reading it cover-to-cover the first time, I read it all again. This has been an excellent reference manual as well. I re-read chapters to pick up concepts I need a refresher on, or to bolster my ideas on how a project should be accomplished. As a consultant, I am expected to be an expert in the field. This forces me to constantly read and train. Of the $1000+ of books I bought (and read) last year, this is the best. For any reviewers that might shed a negative light on this book, I respectfully yet strongly disagree. Ted Paterson's easy going yet technically in-depth reading style is a pleasure to ingest. I have recommended this book to all my peers and junior programmers as required reading, and I recommend it to all Amazon readers.
Rating:
Summary: A good, specific angle on the topic
Review: Good book. As one reader noted above, it seems aimed at providing background information rather than how-to guidance. And this is a good thing. It's definitely worth reading if you're interested in broadening your understanding of COM+ architecture and its underpinnings.
Rating:
Summary: A good, specific angle on the topic
Review: Good book. As one reader noted above, it seems aimed at providing background information rather than how-to guidance. And this is a good thing. It's definitely worth reading if you're interested in broadening your understanding of COM+ architecture and its underpinnings.
Rating:
Summary: He knows his stuff...
Review: I agree, the book is excellent. COM+ is one of those complicated subjects that, when mastered (is that possible?) can make your like SOOO much easier.
Beware, though: some of the author's comments are opinions, not facts. Take this one: "From a scalability point of view, it's better to conduct multiple operations inside stored procedures." Ouch. I HOPE he meant PERFORMANCE, not SCALABILITY, because that statement not only breaks one of the main benefits of stored procedures (code reuse; if you have your SP doing multiple things it's much less likely that you'll be able to use it somewhere else); it also breaks one of the main benefits of scalability (the ability to easily scale out pools of objects that are agnostic about their data source).
But hey, it's a Microsoft Press book, so in fairness, he probably doesn't want us thinking about how to scale mySQL {:-}, as I seem to be doing these days...
Rating:
Summary: He knows his stuff...
Review: I agree, the book is excellent. COM+ is one of those complicated subjects that, when mastered (is that possible?) can make your like SOOO much easier.
Beware, though: some of the author's comments are opinions, not facts. Take this one: "From a scalability point of view, it's better to conduct multiple operations inside stored procedures." Ouch. I HOPE he meant PERFORMANCE, not SCALABILITY, because that statement not only breaks one of the main benefits of stored procedures (code reuse; if you have your SP doing multiple things it's much less likely that you'll be able to use it somewhere else); it also breaks one of the main benefits of scalability (the ability to easily scale out pools of objects that are agnostic about their data source).
But hey, it's a Microsoft Press book, so in fairness, he probably doesn't want us thinking about how to scale mySQL {:-}, as I seem to be doing these days...
Rating:
Summary: You are tired of not knowing enough about MTS?
Review: I am a Junior VB programmer who has been debugging MTS code for about a year. Faced with porting some MTS code to COM+, I bought this book. Reading it I realized that everything I knew about MTS was very well covered in Chapter 1. We were also designing another project and the question of whether we should use an ActiveX DLL or ActiveX EXE project came up. Turns out this is covered in Chapter 4 and that we had made the wrong design decision. So yes, it is well worth the bucks spent! The book is very dense, about 450 pages, but every sentence counts and you will definitely read this many times. This is a must for VB developers who are earning money coding this kind of stuff. --Bert Szoghy, Developer
Rating:
Summary: An excellent overview of COM+ for any programmer
Review: I am amazed by the one bad review that this book received! Ted Pattison's books are known as an excellent introduction to COM/DCOM/COM+ principles, for any programmer, not just VBers. Even Don Box, King of COM, loves these books and recommends them to his C++-based classes. I read this book, after reading the first edition some time ago, and was not disappointed. Ted Pattison is an excellent writer, and explains COM with great aplomb. If you read this and follow it, you will understand COM+. Now, go read Don Box's Essential COM and Brent Rector's ATL Internals to make yourself even smarter. No real COM programmer can live without these three books.
Rating:
Summary: Simply Amazing
Review: I bought this book because I needed to understand how to make presentation programs communicate with databases in a scalable way. Like many self-taught computer programmers/analysts, I tend to learn how to do something before I understand it. This book provided the understanding. In three weeks, my code looks better, it's easier to fix, my registry isn't getting filled with junk any more, and I can actually program COM objects and have them work - not just in Visual Basic, but also in Visual FoxPro. I also learned that many of the things I thought I would have to code myself (ODBC connection pooling, thread apartments, etc. . .) are done for me in Visual Basic. The book also improved my confidence in my code. I learned that as long as all of my COM objects are created within one COM object (which I did by instinct already), and all connections to a database are made as late as possible and released as quickly as possible (which I also did by instinct) then scalability is increased. because I use only 1 thread per client and share DB connections as much as possible. I just build my first 4 tier production program today with this book's help! I can't wait until I get to the HTTP/XML section and learn how to REALLY scale programs!
| 
