Rating: 
Summary: 10-90
Review: 10% good explanation in a clear style.
90% fluff.
Rating: 
Summary: Most Excellent
Review: After playing with ATL for about a week I realized I needed help and Microsoft Press books were not going to be my answer. Merely pages into Chapter 1 and Dr. Grimes had begun teaching me what I needed to know to write real world applications. He doesn't ramble or break your concentration by trying to be funny... every topic is presented in a concise and pratical manner. This is the best advanced book I have ever read and is appropriate for a C++ programmer already familiar with MSVC and the basic concepts behind COM. I find it strange that there is a 'Beginning ATL COM' book though, because my only exposure to ATL before this was a single chapter in the MSVC Programmer's guide and I did not have to play catch-up to follow along.
Rating: 
Summary: An ATL must have
Review: Excellent book, especially the discussion on threading, marshaling, and connection points. This book gets into the guts of ATL so don't plan on reading it in one weekend. It will take a good developer about a week to digest each chapter thoroughly. You will probably end up rereading the book after you gain some experience. Learning COM technologies requires a lot of time and patience and ATL is no exception.
Rating:
Summary: An ATL must have
Review: Excellent book, especially the discussion on threading, marshaling, and connection points. This book gets into the guts of ATL so don't plan on reading it in one weekend. It will take a good developer about a week to digest each chapter thoroughly. You will probably end up rereading the book after you gain some experience. Learning COM technologies requires a lot of time and patience and ATL is no exception.
Rating: 
Summary: Not very good book
Review: First the book is of 670 pages long and not 800 as advertised in the title of Amazon page. Second the author explanations are not clear and detailed. For instance, he doesn't supply good examples for most difficult concepts of COM ATL like aggregation.
Rating: 
Summary: Save your money
Review: I don't understand where these other reviews are coming from. Surely anyone who has read this book knows that the writing is so poor that it takes hours to glean one tidbit of new knowledge. Even then, there aren't any usable code examples to solidify what you think you may have learned.Buy ATL Internals instead, it's a much better book, and doesn't cost $60!
Rating:
Summary: Boring, but informative
Review: I highly recommand this book to those who want to really learn ATL. It delves into implementation detail of ATL abit too much though. It is abit less practical than ATL Internals, but is packed with lots of examples to help beginners grasp the atl/com concept. All in all, this book is definitely worth the money & time to read, but one heck of a boring book to read.
Rating:
Summary: Dry, boring style
Review: I think sometimes that authors of these books write them because they think that people don't like to read MSDN Library and prefer paper editions. This is partially true. However there is a group of people looking fror something more readable and illustrated that Microsoft's texts. This book has been addressed to professionals who probably have good access to current MSDN Library. Unfortunately, after comparison of some parts of book with original documentation I must say that the companion's documentation is better to read and complete (by definition). Examples presented in this book are sometimes the same as in library and no more. The style of explanation of some details is even worse than reading dry technical specifications. It is the waiste of money.
Rating:
Summary: Most excellent
Review: It is a very useful book if you already have some experience with ATL and COM but have some questions about those technologies unanswered. The author gives an excellent explanation of almost any aspect of ATL yet assumes the reader is not a complete newbie. The chapters on Object Wizard and on Threading and Marshalling are particularly useful. In combination with PROFESSIONAL COM APPLICATIONS WITH ATL, this book provides a powerful resource for an ATL COM developer!
Rating:
Summary: Detailed
Review: It's a decent book. Definitely worth the money and much better than "Beginning ATL COM" in that this book is not all about how to use ATL Object Wizard. But just so you know, it is one boring book to read. It takes time n patience to understand how ATL works.
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