Rating: 
Summary: Perfect, Almost
Review: A great look at COM under the hood. The style is clear and friendly, and the code is very well-written and documented. The author starts the first chapter with an excellent introduction that establishes the merits of COM as a component technology as well as the benefits of component-based programming. The following chapters continue with the development of COM Components from DOS command line programmes to fully-working COM Dll's.One of the great things about this book is how the author endeavors to explain the cryptic and confusing terminology of COM. I especially enjoyed the explaination of the concept of COM Apartments, which is the best treatment of the subject that I came upon to date. One has to keep in mind that this book is about COM, and just that. Active X controls are barely touched upon. ATL is not used at all. Instead the author builds his own light-weight library of classes, and that is the only drawback to the book that I can see. It's a great book for understanding the enternals of COM, but you'll probably need another to cover ATL, which is largely the standard library for writing COM and Active X components in C++.
Rating: 
Summary: COM explained in plain C++
Review: Amazing book to start learning COM. If you are a C++ programmer and new to COM, read this book. Dale Rogerson has a very good way of telling the story of COM. There are too many buzz words like DCOM, ATL, MTS, OLE... and I wonder how many know what they are talking about. They are all based on COM and get your COM fundamentals right with this book. Here is a great book to start your journey to conquer Microsft technologies.
Rating:
Summary: Good book but I think 1 chapter is outdated
Review: Good book I got it with a course and read it totally now. It can be used as an easy to read book for the COM virgin. Pre knowledge must be C++ and windows. The Don Box book might also be good but as you compare it to this, that book is more difficult to read and technally detailed. Although I just read the 1st chapter of Essential COM. Only one WARNING: I think the chapter about threads and apartments is outdated or not correct. This thought was confirmed to me in a newsgroup. Just skip this chapter.
Rating:
Summary: Good Book
Review: Must have for first time com programmers - but beware that the book is dated - everyone should be using ATL3.0 now, and this book pre-dates ATL. Very nice intro into the COM basics -- will do well as a prep for 2nd and 3rd bood (look at beginning atl com by grimes, and his advanced professional atl com after you have read this one cover to cover)
Rating:
Summary: An excellent book on the topic
Review: This is much more than a COM book. The book spends a lot of time in the first half talking about the more general concept of interfaces, which is more of a software design topic. Then he shows how to implement those interfaces using C++ abstract classes and gives a very good discussion of inheritence, polymorphism, and virtual function tables. Everything is done in pure C++ so you can see what is going on. No wizards or macros to hide the details. The diagrams were very helpful. Even if you choose to not use the COM architecture for your software the discussion of interfaces will help you write software of much higher quality. Seeing how the interfaces are implemented and the discussion of inheritence and virtual function tables gave me a much better understanding of the C++ language. The key to understanding COM is understanding interfaces and this book does a very good job explaining them. Eventually when the author gets into the Microsoft specific COM library you can see how those chapters build on the earlier chapters. You can see how a program can evolve from a set of inflexible C++ classes, to some compile-time flexible C++ classes that use interfaces, to run-time flexible components using DLLs, and finally a full blown COM component. Near the end of the book it is not as thorough with the examples but that is because the topics presented there are too large to fit in a single chapter. The first 8 chapters are worth the price of the book.
Rating:
Summary: Great Intro - But Ends Too Soon
Review: This is an excellent book to get of the ground with learning the basics of COM. If you work through the examples, you will know the foundation of COM programming. Two things disappointed me. One, the descriptions of his examples became less comprehensive toward the last chpaters, making it harder to grasp. Given the excellent beginning sample, I was disappointed. The thrading chapter in particular left me hanging a bit. Second, I would have liked to have seen a chapter on implementing a existing COM object, such as need for shell programming for example. Otherwise, a good book.
Rating:
Summary: cuts through the RED TAPE
Review: i've been reading books on COM since the past 1 year. Most of the books are initimidating for the beginer. lot of books don't explain what COM architecture is about, they market COM. But this book explains what the COM architecture is about and largely succeeds too. I'd definitely recommend it for programmers begining COM. Agreed that it does not cover all the topics in a great detail such as Connection Points & Type Libs, but hey you can always refer to another book. Dale Rogerson has done a fine job. I like the way he describes things, especially the little stories at the begining of each chapter.
Rating:
Summary: Good Description but bad grammatical presentation
Review: The book is a good one for a beginner in COM. The examples and the descriptions provided are good. What makes reading slightly difficult, is the Grammatical mistakes in various sentences. This requires an effort by the user to rephrase and understand and then read ahead. A little more effort than usual that is required in reading a book.
Rating: 
Summary: Unbalanced
Review: Books starts with very basic expectations of reader level and ends with 400%. ActiveX covered? Where? OLE? Author sends you for details about it to another sources. Pretty much nothing about IDL, marshalling, multi-threading (just take the things as they are). That's not a way such book should be written. Just gives you very general picture of what is COM. Remove the word "inside" from its name.
Rating:
Summary: Good for learning fundamentals
Review: This was my first book on COM, and it's no surprise that it has become a classic. (It probably started the whole wave of "Inside..." books.) COM takes a long time to master, and this should be one of your first stops. It's not *everything* you'll need because the technology continues to advance. There's Active Template Library, and now COM+... and it just keeps maturing.
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