Essential COM (Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)

14 years after publishing, Essential COM is still essential for everyone who wants to fully understand COM technology. .NET replaced COM in many areas, but still, there are many libraries based on COM. Even the latest technologies like Windows Runtime (Metro) or Media Foundation are COM-based APIs. As the book title indicates, Essential COM covers (all) essential parts of COM technology you should know when working with COM. The book is NOT introductory text. In fact, you have to have same basics of COM before reading this book. Some step by step tutorial, or even better Step-by-step book should be considered as prerequisite before reading Box's text. Box tries to explain not just technology itself, but he also presents philosophy that drove designers of COM to design COM as it was designed. The book doesn't contain whole listing of source codes, nor step-by-step examples (showing how to create COM servers - for instance). Instead, there are short snippets of code you can incorporate to your own COM clients or servers (the reason why you need to know how to create COM server from scratch). But if you have basics of COM, the book is the great tool that will extend your knowledge. Especially coverage of apartments (one of the hardest parts of COM) is great. Using this book I filled many gaps. The only thing I don't like are those 'animal' examples. Interfaces like IApe, IDog or IPug are not very intuitive. The last remark. The book is completely valid under Windows 7. I compiled samples (my own, not from companion source) under Visual Studio 2010 for x64 CPU, and there were only minor changes I had to do (ProxyStub DLL for standard marshaler is linked with other LIB and you have to set x64 flag for MIDL compiler). PS: The book doesn't contain explanation of COM support in ATL or MFC. Also #import directive is not covered here.

It is almost 2006 and I just read this book so I could delve into ATL Internals by Chris Sells. Some computer science books are timeless, and this one definitely qualifies. Don Box did such a great job with this book. It is very insightful and does a great job of explaining how COM works. Almost all of the COM development I did in the pre-.NET era was with Visual Basic, but I did have to use Visual C++ out of necessity once in a while. I wish I had read this book years ago. However, even after the fact, this book is a great read.

If you want to learn COM, start here. If you have been using COM but never really learned it, like me, then start here to actually learn about COM. I had been doing so many things wrong. My coworkers had been doing many things wrong. And that is really embarrassing as we should know much better. So read this book.

It is a MUST-HAVE for Windows System Engineers. Very detailed and clear description about COM, even if the book is a bit old. Advised ++

Yes it is 2013 and COM technology is almost history. But if you want to make a product with Win32 dll that needs to be binary compatible with products built using different compilers without COM then books explains you very well on how to do it in the very first chapter of Why COM?

I've been learning COM for a while starting out with VB, and then realizing the real COM developement is done with C++. I have learned all the ways to implement COM object but somehow didn't realize some of the reasoning behind it. This book will tie it all together, and use code to show you the hows and whys behind the theory. It is a great book for a intermediate level COM developer.

This is a great book if you already have some experience with COM. This book fills in all of the detailed gaps and also answers a lot of the whys of COM. I find I always need to have this book around because I always learn something new whenever I have to look something up to contribute to a discussion on COM.

This is a great book and delivers exactly what the jacket says. It is written for C++ developers and those who want to know details about COM. I would not say it is for the beginner, but there is no reason someone couldn't muscle through it.

It is a well-written easily readable and understandable book which is still relevant in 2025 despite some parts being slightly dated. The book was released in 1997 (I was not born yet then). It is a good book even in 2025. The book targets mainly Windows NT 4.0. NT 5.0 (later known as Windows 2000) it mentions as a near future. Because Windows maintains very strong backward compatibility, the vast majority of the book is still valid. Of course, nowadays you will likely not heavily use distributed variant and RPC, but still, COM is used in Microsoft technologies a lot (and new technologies like WinRT are surprisingly still powered by it). Even if you want to stay on the client side, the book gives you a comprehensive description of how COM is designed and how to properly use it. Almost every enum listed in the book is incomplete and nowadays contains more options that did not exist at the time of writing the book. Similarly, all links are dead, but some resources are possible to find with some manual searching effort. The downloadable code at the end of the book is no longer downloadable, but it is printed (on 35 pages), so you can retype it. Code snippets follow the code style typical for the 90s. I do not like Hungarian notation, but who cares? Code examples are mainly in C++, some small codes are in VB (original VB, not VB.NET) and Java. Nowadays you will likely interop with something more modern like Rust, but it is very interesting to see how futureproof this technology is. The book mentions solely COM. It does not describe related technologies like OLE and MFC much. Naturally, it does not know about any features and improvements which were released later. So nothing like COM+, WinMD, regfree COM, etc. is there. I would welcome it if the author described more concepts with diagrams. Typically, some kind of class diagrams are here, but COM concepts are described exclusively using long textual descriptions with a huge cadence of statements. Reading/Understanding some parts is very slow due to this, especially in chapter 5. Otherwise, the book is very easy to read and follow, there are no cross-references across text. At the end of every chapter, there are nice reasonable long summaries which I liked a lot.

Came on time and in good condition.

A distanza di anni, questo è ancora un ottimo testo per studiare COM nei dettagli e per capirne la "filosofia". Il primo capitolo è ottimo nello spiegare le motivazioni che sono alla base di COM, e ne consiglio la lettura ad ogni programmatore che voglia capire questa tecnologia. Lo sviluppo con COM viene semplificato molto dall'uso di framework come ATL, ma capire i fondamenti di COM senza l'ausilio di framework esterni rappresenta un passaggio intellettuale importante.

Excellent Book

Has substantial material on OLE, which is what I was searching for, in a book on COM model.