Customer Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing book
Comment: The book covers ActiveX/COM but in a very wordy fashion. Pages and pages of irrelevant text make finding the core issues difficult. Some of the topic examples are reasonably useful, others are extremely trite. Surely Appleman can come up with better scenarios than rabbits in hutches. I bought this book to help take me beyond what is available in the Microsoft VB documentation, but it does not do so in any useful way. Having already splashed out the money on the book, I would prefer if advertising was kept in one section, rather than having it throughout the book (loads of code segments, no matter how trivial, are prefaced with a Desaware copyright notice, and we are continually told of their software products).
This book has lots of body but not enough meat.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Second review and this is still a bad book
Comment: About a year ago, I wrote a review about this book. Everyone was saying that this was a great book, so when I gave this book only 1 star, I took alot of heat from people who think that "Dan's the Man!!". I decided to review this book again. This is my second review and my result is still the same. Dan may be the guru of Visual Basic but he cannot communicate those thoughts into written words. Don't get me wrong, Dan knows how to talk and this book is full of talk, but talk is not teaching nor will talk help you master the advanced subjects such as COM. In this book, Dan starts to tell you about subject, then he goes off on a tangent. Sooner or later, he might return to the subject. The cartoons in the book have a striking resemblance to "Bevis and Butthead". That is a scary thought! Bevis and Butthead becoming software developers and then writing a book about it. The cheap sales pitches for software that his company sells should have been put into an appendix. This book is a very large book (800+ pages) but if you cut out the cartoons and all of the talk, this book would be 1/2 of it's size. I recommend Peter Vogel's book "Visual Basic Object and Component Handbook" instead. Dan is a very smart man but that does not mean he is a great author.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good book for someone who only likes to read
Comment: I buy most programming books with the expectation that there will be some step by step modules geared toward developing some type of application. I found nothing of the sort in this book. I found a lot of code to demonstrate what the author was saying. I felt the whole book - was geared toward the history and explanation of what various programming components were all about. I am an accomplished ASP Web/Database Developer and was interested in learning how to write activex components. I thank the author for wasting my money!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Geeks get it, newbies don't. Get over it.
Comment: This guy REALLY wants reader to understand EVERYTHING about object orientated language and how to implement it in VB. I bought this book for [money] at a garage sale (well, lots of geeks in my region), and it turned out to be the best VB book ever. Being a C++/VB programmer, I am amazed by what I can do with VB. If you have knowledge of Object Orientated Language, and have 2+ years of experience on VB, this book will bring you to the next level. Otherwise, you will be like other angry reviewers, tearing your hair and grinding your teeth.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent, But Not a Light Read
Comment: One of the major advances in the history of VB was the introduction, a couple revs ago, of creating the objects formerly known as COM, ActiveX components. This opened up a whole world of new applications, and knocked a chip off C++ programmers' shoulders. But even wrapped safely beneath VB's development tools, COM is still a complex subject with plenty of traps for the unwary.But Dan Appleman, dean of Win32 and COM programming, has come to the rescue with this book. Perplexed, indeed. Through clear writing, carefully reasoned descriptions spiced with humor that occasionally has attitude, and thoroughness, the author almost makes clear a complex subject. It still took me a couple of reads to grasp it all, but the work was well worth it. As other reviewers have observed, reading this book through once, or lightly, can leave you more confused than before. Put some work into it, though, and you'll be richly rewarded.
The 28 chapters spread throughout cover every aspect of ActiveX components, from their COM underpinnings to practical ways to build and use them in your projects. Particularly interesting were the chapters ActiveX Myths, IIS Applications, Advanced Techniques, and Multithreading.
The CD-ROM alone is worth the price of admission. It has a bit of promotional stuff for the author's company, Desaware, Inc., but otherwise is full of good information. The help file has a half-hour video presentation was delivered at the 1998 Orlando VBITS about the life of a programmer and, of course, the sample code from the book.
Even though the reader is never in doubt what the author does for a living, besides writing books, the Guide to the Perplexed is one the true must-have books for every professional VB 6 programmer, whether or not you use ActiveX components in your applications.
