Overall, this book is a nice intro to Microsoft's MTS and COM using VB. The labs cover basic usage of MTS and VB with COM. The activities in the labs helped me remember what I learned. Points of knowledge are itemized nicely so you can spot them and mark them with your highlighter.
However, the book reads poorly at times. It is more readable than some classroom material from other courses I have taken (I bought this to read as a book and did not receive it in a class), but it does not have the appeal of a standalone book. For example, on pages 90 and 91 I see the phrase "In this exercise, you will create a new package called Math." repeated three times. Throughout the book you see this sort of repetition. You can skim large sections of the book due to this kind of filler and even larger sections if you don't do the labs. Though I think the labs help, this book is not a study guide. Rather it is a class experience in book form that offers little depth.
Also, this book seem preachy at times, letting me know the glories of Microsoft technology with little mention of alternatives. For example, self-check question 4 in Chapter One is "Select the statement that incorrectly describes a Microsoft Development tool." The answers are of course meant to hammer in that Microsoft's products are wonderful: Answer A is "Visual Basic is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool." So the point of this question is to help me remember how wonderful VB is? Many of the study questions were like this and did not help me test my knowledge much. And I would have appreciated some coverage of using Microsoft MTS and COM with the Oracle database, for example.
In conclusion, if you are very new to MTS, VB, and COM, get this book for quick exposure to the bare-basics with nice labs to bring home the knowledge. But if you already know the basics to these subject, you find yourself skimming large sections of the book and learning little.