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Summary: Excellent overview of COM+ and Win2K DNA technologies
Review: This Book covers important stuff, that is of course DNA technologies. It explains the differene of MTS package and COM+ application. If you want to deploy MTS component to COM+, this book will teach you how to do that. This book however is not for the guys that like to cut and paste code from books. If you need applicable source code, choose Wrox books. This is for the ones who likes to understand the things behind the scene.
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Summary: A must buy for any VB programmer
Review: This book has to be one of the most enlightening books on VB out there. He explains the nitty-gritty of COM and how VB interacts with COM/COM+ in a lucid and straightforward way. Anyone who wants to use VB for COM+ programming has to buy this book.However, this book is not for beginners. If you can't figure out how to do something without lengthy code samples to help you out, you should NOT buy this book. Also, if you don't want to know the underlying technology that makes VB and COM+ work, don't buy this book. This book is great in that it explains why you want to do things a certain way in a COM+ environment, not just how to do them. This is refreshing for a VB book as too many VB books are full of examples with little explanation of the underlying technology.
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Summary: As good as the first edition !
Review: This book is an essential update for the first edition. Eventhough, VB hides a lot of COM+ programming details from the developer, still it is one of the better tool to develop COM/COM+ applications because of the ease of development. Ted has given timely update for changing from MTS to COM+ and other new features for COM+. This book really gives an understanding of COM+ programming using VB that most of the other books didn't explain. Eventhough I still love programming COM/COM+ applications using VC++, I thik VB has better chance and also a lot of cases VB can be used(especially when performance is not a concern). Ted explains all these things very well..The only problem with this book is its highly concentrated! each and every word really counts.....! So while reading you shouldn't miss a single thing!
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Summary: Time Well Spent
Review: This book is definitely time and money well spent. I assess a book by gauging returns for the time I spend on reading the book. I have read only the first 50 pages of the book, and I am certain it definitely more than paid for the money and time spent. My objective is to get a better understanding of COM for VB. I am not a serious VB programmer (I know some intermediate level VB, mostly a SQL DBA), but still find this to be of my level and exactly meeting my expectations. I have read David Chappell's Understanding ActiveX, it is good, but that is a very high level overview, and mostly untenable for VB programmers. This is much more solid. I like the way Ted explains the costs and benefits on 2 tier and 3 tier development and evolution of COM. This is my first review for any book I bought, and hope this helps!
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Summary: What's included in the second edition of this book!
Review: This book is for intermediate and advanced Visual Basic programmers who want to develop for COM+ and Windows 2000. The book focuses on the architecture of the Windows platform. To this extent, it can also serve as a resource for ASP and C++ developers. Some readers might be new to COM. Other readers might already have experience with COM and Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS). My goal in this edition is to accommodate both kinds of readers. Over the past five years, I've thought long and hard about how to craft a story that includes just the right amount of detail. Some technical details are critical. Other technical details are esoteric, and absorbing them would waste your mental bandwidth. I've tried to cover what's important and omit what's not. I wanted to cover a lot of territory while keeping the text as concise as possible. While I make a point of avoiding unnecessary complexity, I also reserve the right to dive into low-level details in places where I think it's appropriate. If you've already read the first edition, you are probably wondering what's different about the second edition. One of my main goals with the second edition has been to create something that adds value for those who have already read the first edition. Over 75 percent of the text for this book has been newly written for the second edition. I have restructured my coverage of the fundamentals of classic COM and placed them as early in the book as possible. Chapter 2, which covers interface-based programming, is the one chapter that's basically the same in both editions. I've condensed the fundamentals of COM that were spread across several chapters in the first edition into Chapter 3 of the second edition. Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 discuss using Visual Basic to create and version components. The material in these chapters has been enhanced from the first edition with new coverage of building custom type libraries with IDL and designing components for scripting clients. For programmers who are already comfortable with COM and MTS, chapters two through five can serve as a quick review or as a reference. Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 cover the architecture of the COM+ runtime environment. The aim is to teach you how to write configured components with VB that take advantage of the runtime services and thread pooling offered by COM+. Chapter 8 on transactions introduces new material that compares local transactions to distributed transactions. Chapter 9 includes new and essential coverage of IIS and ASP. Chapter 10 on messaging has coverage of MSMQ similar to the first edition, but it also adds new material on the Queued Components Service and COM+ Events. Chapter 11 is a security chapter recently written from the ground up. Chapter 12 covers application design issues that affect scalability and performance. It's also important to note the things that are not included in this book. This book doesn't contain many step-by-step instructions. Therefore, this book won't appeal to those who just want to know what to do but don't care why. Throughout the book, I refer you to MSDN to get the details concerning such practices as using the administrative tools for COM+ or IIS. I don't think these are areas in which most programmers need assistance. My goal is to build your understanding of the theory behind the software. Finally, if you're looking for a book with a great big sample application that you can use as a starting point, this isn't the right book for you. Most of my code listings are short, between 5 and 10 lines. When I present a code listing, I always try to do it in as few lines as possible to focus your attention on a particular point. I omit extraneous things such as error handling. For this reason, my style doesn't lend itself to those who are looking to blindly copy-and-paste my samples into production code. I'd rather teach you how to write the code yourself.
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Summary: A Great Book on COM+
Review: This is a great book on COM+ and how to use Visual Basic for developing components for COM+. I can find answers to every question I have on COM+ and the answers are very thorough! Not only does it tell me how, but it also explains why. Highly recommended if you are a VB programmer getting into developing distributed applications in the COM+ environment.
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Summary: Why someone had rated this book under 5 stars?
Review: This is a very good book on COM. Not only for VB programmers, but for programmers from other languages such as C++ as well. VB hides most detail of COM programming from the developers, but this book will help you understand how the VB team did it. This book is very heavy on concept and you wont find many examples in this book. VB programmers may find this book difficult to read, but C++ programmers who knows COM will find this book to be extremely easy to digest. Ted Pattison writes and explains as well as the famous programming book authors Charles Petzold, Jeffrey Richter, and Jeff Prosise.
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Summary: THE authoritative text on VB/COM+
Review: This is not a book to learn VB from. It is not intended as an introductory text for beginners. However, once you've become a fairly proficient VB programmer, there is no better book on the market to help you become a great VB programmer. This book is to VB/COM+ what Kernighan and Ritchie's book "The C Programming Language" was to C. It is THE authoritative text on best programming practices for VB and COM+. It is not an easy read, but it is packed with more valuable insight per page than any other VB book on the market. I should know because as a professional developer I own a lot of them. It is more "informationally dense" than any other 10 VB books that I own. Beginners and entry-level programmers will probably find it mundane, boring, and esoteric. However, advanced-level VB programmers will find it very informative and quite interesting - at times even captivating as you discover new ways of thinking about VB and the way you program. Just one hint... Don't read too much at one time or your brain will melt. Read a little, think about it, absorb it. Read a little more, think about it, absorb it. Over time, read it all, from cover to cover. If you are just looking for a book with lots of code examples that you can cut and paste into your own real-world applications, then look elsewhere. There are many sophisticated programming concepts that Pattison tries to convey to the reader. To accomplish this, he bases his code examples on a very simplistic "Dog object". The idea is to teach difficult concepts in the simplest possible manner, and I think he pulls it off rather well. This is an "idea book" rather than a "code example book". After providing an overview of COM+, Pattison delves into interface-based programming with topics such as user-defined interfaces and both types of inheritance - interface and implementation. Then he hits the fundamentals of COM, addressing Type Libraries and IDL, VB/COM mapping, object activation and the SCM, direct vTable binding through the IUnknown interface vs. late binding through automation's IDispatch interface, the use of dual interfaces, and marshalling. Just the chapters on interface-based programming and COM alone make this book worth purchasing, but Pattison has barely started. He goes on to discuss the finer points of building and designing servers (DLLs), from design issues to error-raising, the versioning of components in COM, and the creation of user-defined interfaces. After going through the ins and outs of working with configured COM+ components and the sharing of resources within a COM+ application, he talks extensively about COM+ transactions and the many considerations of creating components for IIS and ASP. He finishes up with the topics of asynchonous messaging, COM+ security, and the design of scalable applications. Like I said before, this book is informationally dense. As a professional Internet developer and architect that works for one of Atlanta's top technology consulting firms, it is the only VB book I own that I consider invaluable and to which I refer repeatedly. Fortunately it comes with a complete ebook version of the text that I keep installed on my laptop. I highly recommend this book to good VB/COM+ programmers that want to become great VB/COM+ programmers.
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Summary: Categorize under philisophy, not computers
Review: This is the first book I've ever panned. The first half of the book has tiny snippets of source code on how to create a dog object. That's right a "woof, woof" dog. How is this relevant to real world programming? I've been programming many a year; I want to see annotated source code; something I can use. Unless you're a history or a philosophy major, you're not going to get much from this book.
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Summary: What kind of programmer are you?
Review: What kind of programmer are you? One who blindly copies and pastes code from any old book without caring how or why it works? Or one who seeks to understand what is really happening by grasping the underlying principles? If you're of the second type, then this book is for you. It's not bloated with sample projects (I don't expect the author to write my code for me -- that's what I get paid for!) or unnecessary filler. This book provides a complete "tour" of COM and COM+ from Interface based programming to the new features of configured COM+ applications. It is very thorough especially when covering COM fundamentals, transactional components, and Windows DNA in general. The author also explores message queuing using MSMQ in order to better explain the new features of Queued Components. I also enjoyed the coverage of the Shared Property Manager that I have seen little mention of in other publications. It does have a fair amount of code in the latter chapters, if you manage to have the patience to read that far.
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