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Rating: 
Summary: Very Poor
Review: I agree with the sentiment expressed in most of the other customer reviews. This book is very poorly organized, and the material is not well presented. Although there is some useful information in this book, good prior knowledge of COM and MFC are necessary to take advantage of it. The apparent lack of editing of this book would make me think twice about purchasing another technical book from this publisher.
Rating:
Summary: Why is this book still in print?
Review: The author apologizes because the samples don't compile and suggests we rename all the files, all 200 or whatever, I didn't even check. Then, astoundingly, he confesses that "the publisher included earlier and incorrect versions of a handful of chapters in the book." A handful??? Which handful? ... I started reading chapter 2 ("Microsoft Foundation Classes and COM). That must have been one of the chapters that were published from the wrong version. There were numerous typos in it. However, even if there weren't, it is virtually unintelligible. Things come flying at you in all directions from out of the blue with no context. I'm not talking about the material covered in chapter 1 that I did not read, because I was already familiar with that type of material. It was all these MFC macros he was talking about. If I hadn't already just read the MSDN documentation, I would have been totally lost. I found this book at a used bookstore, saw the copyright date of 1998 and was trying to remember when Visual C++ 6.0 came out, to see whether he was using 5.0 or 6.0. I couldn't find that information anywhere on the front or back cover or in a forward anywhere. I took a chance and bought the book anyhow. Then I ran across a code sample that said something like, "Be sure you're running 5.0." Brother. The other thing is, he takes pain to point out Microsoft's latest terms for things. He says they used to be called "servers" now their called "components." Well, NOW they're called "servers" again in the MSDN documentation. I found numerous other terms that are out of date, some of which predate this book, were changed in the 5.0 timeframe, and then reverted back to the original. This book is useless.
Rating: 
Summary: Comments from Author
Review: The samples in the book seemlingly do not work. The cd-rom containing the examples was created using 8.3 file names, which damaged the original long file names and directory structure. This problem is resolved by renaming the files and directories. There are editing issues. Mistakenly, the publisher included earlier and incorrect versions of a handful of chapters in the book. The content in the book is complete and worthwhile. I apologize for the distraction caused by the samples and poor editing. However, I am proud of the book and have met many IT developers that have benefitted from the content.
Rating:
Summary: Comments from Author
Review: The samples in the book seemlingly do not work. The cd-rom containing the examples was created using 8.3 file names, which damaged the original long file names and directory structure. This problem is resolved by renaming the files and directories. There are editing issues. Mistakenly, the publisher included earlier and incorrect versions of a handful of chapters in the book. The content in the book is complete and worthwhile. I apologize for the distraction caused by the samples and poor editing. However, I am proud of the book and have met many IT developers that have benefitted from the content.
Rating:
Summary: Very Poor
Review: This book was very helpful to me. I was looking for information on how to write Container code and build my own Word/Excel style editor in C++ from Stingray components. Granted generic Containers do not solve the problem of WYSIWYG printing (which is a hard problem); and this book did not address that part of the problem. But it does a lot better job of describing and giving the code of what a Container needs to do beyond the "Scribble" sample on the MSDN cd. The nature of this topic is that as I entered in the code from the book and became more familiar with the topic, and re-read the text the author had written - sometimes the same passage multiple times after experimenting with the code samples, I understood what was going on and needed to go better and better. This is not easy stuff and I was very glad to find this book because it really helped me understand and do the project.
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