Rating: 
Summary: Good start for Com developes
Review: This great book gave me a very deep and broad approach to COM development using VC++ 5.0 I can recommend this book to anyone who wants to know the COM/ActiveX concept from the foundations.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting reading on a complex subject.
Review: Each chapter starts with a story or allegory that somehow relates to the ideas of the chapter. I thought this was a unique and greatly helpful way to keep my interest in the book. It helped me understand the abstract theories involved in COM. This was an excellent guide for solving the problems I was having creating an ATL control in ActiveX. Every time I had a problem, this book provided an answer. The examples were complex, but explained well. They were an exact match to the problems I was trying to solve. Rogerson has created a masterful work that you will never regret buying.
Rating: 
Summary: A good book for COM beginers
Review: It's a good book to start COM. The approach of the book is good and it starts from basic concepts to finer details. However in many solved examples the header files are missing !! for example in Chapter 4 many programs use "create.h" but this file is not defined anywhere.
Rating:
Summary: good book, but need samples
Review: This is a good book to start learning COM. But I found the last sample program--Tangram did not compile because of missing header files. I tried to generate .h files from idl using midl but I still can not get model_c.h that was needed in mainfrm.cpp. Anyone know how to get it?
Rating:
Summary: Lets you know
Review: Till today I didn't know what exactly is COM, Interface, OLE etc. But first chapter itself explained me about COM in very simple way.
Rating:
Summary: Good luck finding a better intro book
Review: This book is about as good as they come. Dale Rogerson should be commended. I've been in this field longer than most and can safely say this is one of the best intro books I've ever read. Clear, concise and straight to the point. No bloated examples that run for 200 pages. Just tiny and very simple snippets of code demonstrating the precise mechanics of how to develop a COM object from scratch. Target audience is C/C++ developers with a Microsoft compiler background though others will benefit as well. Don't listen to the naysayers on this one. This book is terrific.
Rating:
Summary: #1 COM book
Review: This is the best book on COM. It teaches you what is COM and how to use it. Essential COM only tells you what is COM, but does NOT tell you how to use it. If you really need to use COM, go to this book. If you are not interested in what is under the hood, you may only need VB COM. But as a professional COM programmer, you got know what's going on inside. One reminder is that you need to have C++ knowledge. But that's the way it is. Buy this book and read it a couple of times. You would eventually understand what is COM.
Rating:
Summary: Great Introduction to COM
Review: After skimming through four other books on COM and ActiveX, I found Inside COM to be the most clear and concise of all the books that I read.It provides a good high-level overview of COM and avoids a lot of the nasty details until later... A great first book on COM.
Rating:
Summary: A great book on a complex subject
Review: I have to say that i was quite impressed by the content of this book. I started with David Chappell's book on COM and ActiveX and this took me a bit deeper into this somewhat complex subject. I would recommend it to anyone. One caveat - you must at least understand the basics of C++ to get any serious value from it as this is the authors language of choice. Nice book, though
Rating: 
Summary: Decent book, could use more real world examples
Review: Aside from a bad sense of humor, this book does provide some good information. It has been very helpful in introducing the concepts of COM. The author could have explained things more clearly by using real world examples as opposed to the IY and IZ examples. I would recommend this book for people familiar with C++ and are wanting to learn COM.
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