I must admit I have just read the 5 first chapters these last 3 days and I feel I've gained a deeper understanding of COM. - However the authors does not state how to set up the VC++ project settings to get the code to work. - I've been fighting of Linker errors most of the time since I started typing in the code. It may be I am not proficient enough in VC++ but with a little help from the book I could be focusing on COM instead of VC++ quirks.

Some of the code included and libraries but did not have "using namespace std" in the printed code. Since I have just been studying namespaces this was not the biggest problem for me.

I went to www.mcp.com to fetch updates but I was very dissapointed that there was no updates there.

Even though I feel that the book has allready given me more in depth insight in COM I am dissapointed that I have to spend a lot of time browsing the CD-project code to see what made the samples work.

I liked the book because it gave a good overview of COM/DCOM technologies. It really is the most friendly introduction to COM development. Since the title indicates this book is a primer, I wasn't expecting anything more. I didn't regret purchasing the book, and I would probably recommend it to someone brand new to COM development.

Having said that, it wasn't the best COM development book I've read, primarily because there was a lot of unnecessary material to wade through. For example, chapter 2 starts by explaining basic C++ object-oriented topics such as classes and inheritance. Presumably the reader is already familiar with these simple concepts, and isn't trying to learn C++ with this book. I'm new to C++ and even I found these topics unnecessary. Since the author explores COM via MFC, the reader never gets a clear understanding of COM itself. More difficult topics, like aggregation, aren't explained at all, but are left to MFC to implement behind the scenes. The main sample program is a big MFC program, which means you have to wade through pages of MFC code to understanding the few lines of COM-specific code. The chapter on multithreading is worthless. It consists of a series of terse descriptions of multithread API calls, followed by a couple of pages of unexplained, uncommented code which use the calls.

Inside COM by Dale Rogerson is a better intro to COM programming, but doesn't cover the breadth of material this book does.

Not as good as "Inside COM" which I also rate as a 5 star book but is simpler to understand and can be used very effectively in conjunction with the above named book. Very reasuring to the reader.