I am not a COM programmer. In the past I have made some calls to COM objects, but did not understand it. I was programming by example and had no idea about all the possible values of the parameters. Now that I have read this book I do understand a little bit more about the basics, but I am still uncomfortable with all the Microsoft defined macros and type definitions. It is quite difficult to retain all the fundamentals if you are not familiar with all the Microsoft type definitions like HRESULT, DWORD and LPWSTR. The Hungarian notation does not make it clearer.

The book consists of 14 chapters. An introduction and in each chapter another COM concept; VTBL interfaces and Dispatch interfaces, automation, type libraries, the different apartment models, monikers, asynchronous COM and support for COM in VC++, ATL, Visual Basic and Visual Java. Each chapter comes with C++ examples. You have to download the examples from the supporting web site and play with them in your own environment.

This book might give you an introduction, but you definitely need more reference books and a lot of experience to use COM correctly.