ATL Internals (The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)

Author: Brent E. Rector, Chris Sells List Price: $54.95 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0201695898 Publisher: Pearson Educational (31 March, 1999) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 56,588 Average Customer Rating: 4.46 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

On the other hand, if you are using Visual Studio .Net with ATL 7.0, then I would advise borrowing this book from a friend or buying it used. 75% of the information contained carries over to ATL 7.0, but the other 25% has a few gottchas. For example, the authors mention a suite of undocumented ATL classes for the Windows controls (CButton, CListBox, etc.), but these classes have been removed from ATL 7.0. OUCH! It *is* tempting to use them! :^) There are also a lot of new classes added to ATL 7.0 that could use the explanatory skills of Mr. Rector, et al. I give this book a three-star usability rating with ATL 7.0, therefore, the four-star rating over-all.

This is a good book that is in need of an update-a fate shared, sooner or later, by most computer books. I hope the authors and the publisher have a new one in the works.

I have a good number of books on COM and ATL but getting the low down on ATL starts and ends in this book. The coverage in unbeleiveable. It will make you think you were part of the ATL implementation team.
This book is not a short cut for learning COM programming.You should have a good understanding of how COM works and you also need to know your c++ well(emphasis on well. This book does not teach c++)
However, considering the .NET revolution, ATL may not be of much use for much longer.But if for some reason you need to learn ATL, this book is the ATL University.

ATL Internals not only discusses ATL but also does and excellent job discussing COM's theory of operation and how a Win32 OS supports COM.

As a warning, however, ATL Internals isn't the only book that you need on a COM project because it is specialized on ATL (and on COM in general). While ATL is useful it is not the only thing that you will have to deal with on a COM project. You will probably need to work with IDL files and for that I can unequivocally recommend "Essential IDL" by Martin Gudgin.

ATL Internals accomplishes several things well; I will try to describe the most valuable aspects of this book. One of the best properties of this book is that it is thorough. It covers ATL in depth.

The following is a partial list of the material in ATL Internals:

1) ATL Internals covers using the wizards and explains how to proceed beyond the point where the wizards quit.
2) A though discussion of ATL facilities. For example: CComPtr (a COM smart pointer), CComBSTR (a class wrapped around the error-prone BSTR datatype) classes are covered in detail. The text conversion macros are completely covered here. In other books and on the internet I saw code examples that used them but will little explantion.
3) Bug warnings, both your (potential) bugs and bugs within ATL. The authors point out the buggy parts of ATL and they invest the necessary effort to warn out about aspects of ATL that, if naively used, create bugs. Numerous pages are dedicated to showing both how to correctly use certain hazardous parts of ATL as well as examples of buggy code. Depreciated techniques are also described for completeness.
4) Discussion and examples of various COM issues, including threading issues, connection points, the Service Control manager (SCM)and so on.
5) Detailed discussion of the numerous macros that Microsoft uses to conceal substantial code, (e.g. BEGIN_OBJECT_MAP, COM_INTERFACE_ENTRY_IMPL, etc.)
6) One of the appendixes shows a cross reference between ATL classes and header file names. This was a welcome convenience (yes I could have greped, but this is quicker)

ATL Internals not only has great content but it is written in a very readable style. The typeset is easy to read and the diagrams are well done.

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