In a nutshell, this book was exactly what I was looking for. Hamilton does a great job with this ever-so difficult topic. He starts out with a simple example based upon his imaginary file type, and builds upon it every chapter. In the end, you can easily see how the different aspects of the shell can work together.
Although I was well versed in VB before reading this book, I had virtually no experience with COM. This posed no problem, since Hamilton does an excellent job quickly covering the basics. That said, shell programming is still no walk in the park. But with a bit of determination, it is well within grasp - even for the VB programmer.
The book does suffer minorly from "first edition" bugs. The downloadable examples that go with the book did not work fully on my Windows 2000 machine. The drop handler crashed Explorer every time the ".RAD" file was right-clicked on. Also there were a few mistakes in the source code in the book, but nothing that couldn't be figured out. Also, a couple of the examples could have been a little more detailed, such as the Property Sheet section.
All in all, this is a great book that you will not regret reading.
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