Amazon Review

Dan Appleman's Developing COM/ActiveX Components with Visual Basic 6 provides expert-mode knowledge of COM controls along with a guide to some of the latest features in Visual Basic. Extremely thorough and densely packed with advice, this book is just right for the programmer who needs to know all the details about Visual Basic controls.

The author begins with a tour of ActiveX and COM, along with some common myths about the technology. His introduction to COM technology is good, but Appleman also explains the pros and cons of COM objects used as in-process dynamic-link libraries (DLLs), standalone EXEs, and remote processes.

When it comes to Visual Basic, the author gives plenty of expert knowledge on class and project options. He covers how to design objects in Visual Basic up close and includes some hard-to-find material on collections and multithreading programming techniques. Appleman also provides an interesting example, a live stock-quote server.

A good deal of the book concentrates on writing ActiveX controls in Visual Basic. Although some developers use the Active Template Library (ATL) and Visual C++ for high performance, it's clear that Visual Basic can do a fine job of creating reusable controls. The author presents a soup-to-nuts tour of ActiveX control development, with due consideration of such topics as properties, events, property pages, and even security and signing. Final sections on ActiveX Documents and the new Visual Basic 6 WebClasses (for ASP development) show off Internet development. In all, this book offers much useful material on expert-mode topics geared to the more seasoned Visual Basic developer. --Richard Dragan

Customer Reviews...

A reader from USA
Wake Up and Read this Book!
I had to respond having read the off base previous review. This is one of the best technical books I have ever read and the source code is printed out entirely. Appleman goes beyond boring details and shows you with simple examples the inner workings of VB. Actually, I have been converted to respecting VB now that I understand how Object Oriented it truly can be. He has very few personal judgments and if he does, he backs up his arguments with logical bench marks that can really open your eyes to performance tuning. I recommend it as an ESSENTIAL book to anyone who will be writing code in VB, regardless of the level.

A reader from Derry, Northern ireland
A Visual Basic standard
Easily one of the best books in the field I have ever had the pleasure to read. I am currently recommending this book as the standard reading for all VB developers in my workplace. The style makes the book easy to read and the content and examples are first class. I cannot recommend too highly this excellent book