A. YOU said
Lotsa of projects to help in understanding Win32.
I compiled projects with VS 2005 and plan to try
others. Some tutorials like Forger's win32 would
definitly help before you approach this book.
John J. McNally said
This is a GREAT book! Unfortunately, it NO LONGER comes with a CD-ROM!!!
So if YOU have the time to MANUALLY key in over 140,000 lines of code, then you SHOULD buy this book....assuming that you could make NO ERRORS!!!!???
As a minor point, it also comes as two(2) paperback volumes.
This is not a problem for me...I like paperback, BUT it is one more point where this product is being MISREPRESENTED.
Robert B said
I have owned this book for at least seven years and have made a couple of good attempts to read/study it with some success as it may not be the best first book for programming the Win32 API although it certainly treats the subject in excruciating detail and with insights garnered by the two authors who are two of the most consummately professional programmers in the world - Brent Rector and Joseph Newcomer. For example Herb Schildt's Programming Windows 98 from the Ground Up teaches WIN32 programming and I find myself more productive in less time studying that book, even though WIN32 programming teaches with a philosophy that one is (ultimately) going to be writing large multifile programs, and this philosophy isn't apparent in Schildt's book. Additionally, an added bonus of Win32 Programming are the insights one gets into writing more robust and professional code - the C code (and there is a lot of it - 140,000 lines included on the CD ROM) has been written by the very best programmers. Additionally, the treatment of each topic is probably more in depth in this book - one example being the discussion of the GDI. More advanced topics included are chapters on writing a DLL, writing an MDI application, and writing multithreading applications. Finally, at 1500 pages the book is reference-like and also like a textbook thus I would assume that it may well take the better part of a year to study each chapter and the associated applications, making it one of the finest and most comprehensive books ever written on WIN32 API programming. I paid $50 for it at UCLA and the book has stood the test of time and proves to be an invaluable work well worth the cost. Finally, this book would seemingly rank among the most professional and scientific computer science/programming titles ever written - certainly it would be one of the most massive - the index is around 200 pages long in itself!
R. Reese said
Very good on the level of detail, and incredible on the pitfalls and specific problems they found when actually writing the code for the examples. Be careful, though - a number of the tables (and even some of the printed code samples) contain typos and other minor errors (like missing headings, making one table pretty useless!). You can figure out what's wrong, but if you just use this as a reference and happen to hit a section with an error you might not catch it without reading the accompanying text. I read it through, rather than as a reference, and it was clear which parts of the text had only been lightly checked for the latest edition.
Again, 95+% of this book is really great! And the anecdotes and clear detail on where MS documentation is "flawed" are of terrific value - I definitely am glad to have purchased it, but I also want to point out that if something in it doesn't make sense - you're probably not crazy. It's quite likely to be a typo...
Oh - one more thing. The "Explorer" samples they include were a fabulous idea, and have really helped me figure out what the heck some of the various style (and other) flags really meant. Extra credit for the CD! :-)
Anonymous said
If you are an experienced Win32 programmer looking for a good reference, or you learned MFC but want to know what's going on under the hood, this is the book for you. If you are a beginner looking for a book to teach you how to program Windows, do not get this book. Lots of tables, just the right amount of code examples, lots of real-world advice, and a 200-page index. This book does not cover MFC.
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