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There are several different ways in which a book about computer technology may be found useful. Some computer books are compendiums of well-vetted reference material, such as Donald Knuth's classic The Art of Computer Programming, or both the C/C++ and Fortran volumes of the invaluable Numerical Recipes series (now available to read online for free at http://beta.ulib.org/webRoot/Books/Numerical_Recipes/). Other useful computer books are graded tutorials, such as Art of Prolog or Starting Forth.
And one of the most useful kinds of computer book is a book about an emerging technological domain wherein the author does something clever right on the bleeding edge and writes knowledgeably about his or her achievement. Just such a book is Ronan Geraghty et al.'s fine COM-CORBA Interoperability.
If interoperability of Microsoft's Common Object Model and OMG Common Object Request Broker Architecture is your concern yet remains murky to you, you might as well stop reading this review right now and go buy the book. The authors are the architects of Iona's COMet COM-CORBA bridge. They've done it, they understand it, and they explain it very well.
COM-CORBA Interoperability comes with a CD-ROM containing a trial version of Iona's Orbix object request broker, COMet, and source code for demonstration applications providing interoperation of COM and CORBA entities. The code runs on Windows 95/NT with the DCOM 1.1 upgrade installed. Examples come already compiled; to recompile the examples from the source, you'll need Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0 for the C++ examples and Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 for the Basic examples.
Perhaps the finest aspect of this book is that the authors explain the architectural challenge faced in creating COMet in sufficient detail. Reading the discussion allows one to visualize pretty clearly the lines of the solution without immersing oneself in the actual product.
Thus, for the purely application-centric reader faced with real-world problems and a deadline, the answers and the tools are present and complete. For the theorist and senior architect, a quick flipping of the pages brings one up to speed on the problem domain and provides several satisfactory solution scenarios.
The 12 chapters of COM-CORBA Interoperability are:
There is also a little gem of a subsection, "DCOM Programming: From 0 to 60 in < 10 seconds," which explains almost everything you'll ever need to know about DCOM in eight pages. This is geek jazz. They're noodling on Microsoft technology and effortlessly blowing away most of the smoke.
So whether you take COM-CORBA Interoperability as an executive summary or as a detailed implementation tutorial, do take it, and enjoy this concise volume.
-- Jack Woehr
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Explanation of ERCB rating scale: No stars = unacceptable, 1 Star = marginal, 2 Stars = average, 3 Stars = above average, 4 Stars = exceptional.