Olivier Langlois's blog

ATL is an interesting C++ framework to easily create COM classes. It uses extensively the C++ templates and is coupled with Visual C++ wizards to automate the writing of skeleton code of an ATL project. However there is not much documentation coming with VC++ on ATL and there are so much options in the wizards dialog windows that unless you know what you are doing, you will probably not do the right thing. This is where this book comes in.

First, one of the coauthor, George Shepherd, is also the coauthor of the book MFC Internals that I really liked. This book does a good job to guide you through the main ATL features. My only complain is that, like almost every other book on COM that I have read, it assumes that you know nothing about C++ and COM and takes the first 2 chapters to introduce you these topics and that represents almost 100 pages of prerequisite material that should have been found only in a introduction book IMO.

This book borrow the format that made the Effective C++ popular. It presents 50 tips on COM. Its targeted audience is developers that have been using COM for a while. Prior knowledge of COM is expected for reading this book. In general, it provides very good tips but the only exception is the section about MTS. Maybe the tips are good but I do not know as I have never worked with MTS. That section contains 8 tips of the 50 tips of the book.