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Search in Book Reviews

The ACCU passes on review copies of computer books to its members for them to review. The result is a large, high quality collection of book reviews by programmers, for programmers. Currently there are 1949 reviews in the database and more every month.
Search is a simple string search in either book title or book author. The full text search is a search of the text of the review.
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Title:
ActiveX Controls Inside Out
Author:
Adam Denning
ISBN:
1 57231 350 1
Publisher:
Microsoft Press
Pages:
635pp&CD
Price:
£37-49
Reviewer:
Mike Woolley
Subject:
MS Windows; CORBA and COM
Appeared in:
11-2
This is a new edition of Adam Denning's earlier bookOLE Controls Inside Out, which was reviewed in C Vu 9.2. The book has been updated to reflect the changes brought to ActiveX controls by the OCX96 and ActiveX specifications (more than just a change of name!).

The book is split into 3 parts; the first part is a good presentation of the parts of COM necessary to understand how ActiveX controls work. The second part is a thorough discussion of how to create ActiveX controls using Visual C++ and the MFC. Particularly useful, is that time is spent explaining what is going on at the COM-level underlying the MFC code. The third part contains advanced topics, such as hosting ActiveX controls in Web pages.

This is a good book as far as it goes, but by limiting itself to Visual C++ and MFC, its usefulness is restricted. Discussion of using the ATL to create controls (which is probably the current method of choice for developers) is limited to 4 pages in an appendix. The book was also out of date as soon as it was published (this is a problem that affects many books about Internet-related subjects); for example, the wizard examples use VC++ 4.2 and ATL1.1 rather than the current and somewhat different ones in VC5.0 and ATL2.0.