Essential COM
by Don Box · first published 1998
18mentions
11recommended by
12HN commenters
2016–2026first – last mentioned
92% recommend8% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Clear, approachable explanation of COM's core ideas that clears away confusion; praised as one of the best computer books and useful for anyone studying object systems, not only Windows developers.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Here are some good COM books. Essential COM by Don Box https://www.amazon.com/Essential-COM-Don-Box/dp/0201634465 Inside COM by Dale Rogerson https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Microsoft-Programming-Dale-Rog... Then if you have access to public…
on “Designing a COM Library for Rust” ↗…of technologies summarized https://web.archive.org/web/19990117055950/http://www.develo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_Object_Model Don Box wrote an excellent in-depth book about COM: "Essential COM": "Nobody explains COM better than Don Box" -Charlie Kindel, COM Guy, Microsoft Corporation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Box https://archive.org/details/essentialcom00boxd Unfortunately COM had…
on “COM vs SOM: The Component Object Model and Some Other Model (1999)” ↗+1 for Essential COM by Don Box, it still survives my bookshelf purges..."just-in-case". IUnknown and IDispatch are burned permanently in my memory from a period of my life building a COM/CORBA bridge.
on “Designing a COM Library for Rust” ↗I was a junior back then but COM felt like magic to me. I think MS made COM more arcane than necessary. It was not until I read the book Essential COM by Don Box that I understood COM.
on “Staring into the COM Abyss” ↗…of technologies summarized https://web.archive.org/web/19990117055950/http://www.develo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_Object_Model >Don Box wrote an excellent in-depth book about COM: "Essential COM": "Nobody explains COM better than Don Box" -Charlie Kindel, COM Guy, Microsoft Corporation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Box https://archive.org/details/essentialcom00boxd >Unfortunately COM…
on “Introduction to WebAssembly Components” ↗The core of COM is simple, elegant, and definitely "reachable". Don Box's "Essential COM" is a great book on the topic that clears away all the cobwebs that you fear are there. The more advanced topics do indeed become a bit more complicated. The core idea of COM is that you have objects…
on “GObject” ↗Don Box wrote an excellent in-depth book about COM: "Essential COM" It's on my desk right now, I was relatively inexperienced when I first read it so I thought it might be worth another look 15 years later.
on “COM vs SOM: The Component Object Model and Some Other Model (1999)” ↗…stuff you could do in VB as written about by Matthew Curland in his excellent book "Advanced Visual Basic 6: Power Techniques for Everyday Programs"[0]. Armed with a copy of Curland's book and Don Box's "Essential COM" you could be really dangerous :) [0]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Advanced-Visual-Basic-Programming-D...
on “Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic” ↗If that didn't make your head explode, try Essential COM by Don Box! https://github.com/spb59h2/spb5 Once you grok it for what it actually is (C++ pure virtual classes), COM is really pretty beautiful. Until you get to the DCOM stuff...
on “Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life (2022)” ↗…libraries/frameworks/architectures/kernels/etc. to really understand "Software Engineering" from many perspectives. That is where insight comes from and real understanding happens. For people interested in understanding COM, see the classic Essential COM by Don Box.
on “Thoroughly Understanding C++ ABI” ↗…security of calls." If you want to learn more about this (it's an incredibly powerful concept that has a wide range of uses and is very much still used today), my recommendation would be: 1. The book: "Essential COM (1997)" by Don Box, one of the architects of COM at Microsoft in the 90s https://www.amazon.com/Essential-COM-Don-Box/dp/0201634465 2. The online tutorial "COM in plain C", which is one of the only…
on “Is RESTFul Paradigm a Type of FFI (Foreign Function Interface)?” ↗"Essential COM" is one of the top computer books ever written and I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in object systems even if they don't code for Windows. (e.g. I think better than "The Art of the MetaObject…
on “Staring into the COM Abyss” ↗I'm gonna piggyback on your comment to give another shout out to Essential COM. I haven't touched COM in ages but that book is so good I still pick it up every once in a while -- and it was a lifesaver back when I did touch COM on a daily basis.
on “Designing a COM Library for Rust” ↗…least books that were so much better than the reference docs that the latter could barely be said to explain anything, whatever the intent of the authors. This includes the classics: Petzold, Inside OLE, Essential COM, ... .
on “The Worst API Ever Made” ↗…old comment about the decline of .NET's WPF and its limited adoption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14098832) [1] Was MS Technical Fellow and author of 1998 COM book: https://www.amazon.com/Essential-COM-Don-Box/dp/0201634465
on “A History of .NET Runtimes” ↗