Olivier Langlois's blog

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.

This book is probably the best COM introduction book for C++ programmers. It walks you through the basics such as the IUnknown and the IDispatch interfaces, the different types of COM servers and the threading models. Everything is explained in clear writing style.

I have also read Programming ADO from David Sceppa and I prefer this one because it contains a lot examples with source code. My only complain is that there is only a small C++ program and the rest are all in Visual Basic. However, this is not a big issue as it is very easy to port the samples in C++.

This is a very old book dating from Windows 3.1 era. It walks you through the methodology one could take to encapsulate the Windows API in a C++ framework. Most of the information contained in the book is still accurate today except for one chapter related to memory management.

This book covers in details the GDI API and the DirectDraw API. Even if it was written for Windows 2000, it is safe to assume that these APIs have not changed much in Windows XP. The source code samples contain mistakes but it remains an excellent reference. I recommend this out of print book because you can probably get it for a very cheap price.