From the VB POV and for some $$, there is a course in the Microsoft curriculum that covers much of this. The title doesn't describe it well but it's

Mastering Microsoft Visual Basic 6 Development
Course No. 1013 - 5 days
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At Course Completion

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

Write a Microsoft Visual Basic-based application that accesses data from a database.
Write a Visual Basic-based application that uses component object model (COM) components.
Create an ActiveX® control.
Create a COM component.
List the opportunities that Visual Basic developers have to incorporate Internet technologies into their applications.