This may not be authoritative enough, but I found John Levine's "Linkers and Loaders" to be a very informative guide to the general concepts of linking, includi

This may not be authoritative enough, but I found John Levine's "Linkers and Loaders" to be a very informative guide to the general concepts of linking, including the various architectures like ELF and COM. http://linker.iecc.com/ http://linker.iecc.com/ Edit: not that they're conventionally called "architectures" or that COM has any structure to it.