Rating:  - Still valuable
I read this book about ten years ago first time. When I have to deal with a COM problem, I still find it useful.
Rating:  - Not a good book to start COM
If you want to learn COM I dont think this book is a good start. It is a great book and I think every COM developer should read it, however; it is not a step-by-step into. It also doesn't have small projects which let's your get feet wet w/COM. I would recommend "Inside COM" by Dale Rogerson to start learning COM.
Rating: - no source code
I read Essential COM almost 10 years ago, and revisited it recently, out of curiosity. It's tough sledding, but if you *must* know this stuff, this is probably it.
However, throughout the book the phrase "the source code that accompanies this book" occurs repeatedly. As far as I could ascertain after an hour or so of googling and searching, there *is* no such source. I assume it stopped working 5 years ago or something, and rather than continuing to provide it somewhere on the web with a disclaimer -- which I assume would be embarrassing to Mr. Box -- it has been silently "disappeared". I consider this mildly unethical, and certainly annoying, since many perhaps minor points are supposedly demonstrated by this non-existent source.
Rating: - A must read book for learning COM
I have learned a lot with this book. I would not qualify the book an introduction book because unless you have some background knowledge and practice, you are going to find the last chapters hard to digest. What the book does is to covers the essential principles of COM with great details. This will make the first reading very interesting and it will make you come back from time to time to seek back specific detail.
Rating: - Buy this book FIRST when you want to learn Microsoft's Common Object Model
All vetran C++ programmers should learn this along side MFC, it assumes a minimal knowledge of COM so it is easy to pick up, and gets you familiar with the common elements of this widely used standard (CLSIDs, IIDs, COM Functions, etc) Shell programmers will want to read this first. See my other reviews for more good books in COM.
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