The beginning ATL 3 COM Programming is an excellent book to start with COM. In order to learn COM (and the following is probably right for most things in life) you've got to start from the beginning. Although IS developers would need to struggle at least another COM book before they get to read some databases but I believe you can't skip this one and as usual the WROX guys (which sometimes my wife doesn't like there pictures) do the work. So ATL can be fun and this book is much more than I needed for a start.