Title: This book only gets you to first base.
Product review: This book does fairly well (but not wonderfully) to describe the basic concepts to the beginner, and it gives you some code to get started on. After reading this book and completing the examples, I only barely know enough to get started with ATL. If you buy this book you will soon need to read another just to feel competent in ATL.The first 75 pages are a very basic overview of templates and COM. The book then introduces ATL's implementation of IUnknown, IDL, Aggregation, IDispatch and Dual Interfaces, Connection Points, and Active X controls in the middle of the book. This content is covered in no real detail. The section (paragraph?) on marshalling is so thin that no useful information could be gained from it. Tacked on to the end are sections on Asynchronous Download, COM threading, MFC, and COM +. Without a detailed understanding of the core concepts of ATL, these sections are useless.
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