Understanding how COM works can be intimidating at first. One reason for this intimidation is the fact that COM uses its own vocabulary. A second reason is that COM contains a number of new concepts. One of the easiest ways to master the vocabulary and concepts is to compare COM objects to normal C++ objects to identify the similarities and differences. You can also map unfamiliar concepts from COM into the standard C++ model that you already understand. This will give you a comfortable starting point, from which we'll look at COM's fundamental concepts. Once we have done this, the example presented in the following sections will be extremely easy to understand.
