According to the title, this book focuses on COM in Visual Basic, but the author spends many pages using Java to illustrate his points. I am a learn-by-example programmer, and this book is seriously lacking in examples. He refers to the "naieve VB programmer" who understands little about the interface between the COM object and Windows. Well, I'm proud to say that I am one of those "naieve VB programmers" who cares little about the behind-the-scenes operations, and just wants to know "How do I do X ?" I think I'm going to return this book and pick up "Distributed COM Application Development Using Visual Basic 6.0" by Jim Maloney. This is the second time I've been let down by Microsoft Press.