Jon M. Rauch said
This book is great, it doesn't hold your hand. You have to dissect the authors' programs yourself to relate them to the conceptual material in the chapters. Like all good teachers, they only explain difficult or misleading areas of the examples in detail, providing conceptual but not step-by-step explainations of the more easily deciphered (or otherwise just review material related) points in the code.
Don't buy this book for more than a joy-read without buying Windows Vista 32-Bit or Windows 7, however, because most of the programs will not work. (I tried out the code from the website (NoCD library book :( ). A simple trip to MSDN to look up the function that fails to execute in over half the example programs confirms this fact.)
I also reccommend Programming Windows by Charles Petzold and Windows Internals by Mark Russinovich/David Solomon as parallel companions to this book (that means keep them next to you, ready to reference...also don't forget to load up MSDN on your notebook!).
This is a very very involved read, which I like. Like I said before, you can't just sit there and watch the text go by on this one, so get your brain working! I will be ordering my own copy as soon as I upgrade to Vista or 7.
Anonymous said
I recently updated my previous century's copy of "Advanced Windows" to this one. This book adds a few details about Windows Vista although as a programmer I wouldn't want to do anything Vista specific. It dicusses not just how you would, say, use virtual memory, but also why. The discussion on architecture mkaes the book more or less complete. The chapter on DLL hooking will save you a lot of researching the Microsoft web site. A well written book that will be of use to a Windows C/C++ programmer. Christophe Nasarre is an author to watch out for.
An Amazon client said
As in many other books, this book also contains erroneous programs. And, what is even worse, one program which one of the authors claims he has solved a deadlock situation does not work the way he says it should, which means that program is NOT the solution.
The program is at page 569, where the function DisableThreadLibraryCalls does not solve the deadlock situation described on the previous page. Even more, the thread created is NOT run in any of two situations. I have tried the program on Windows 2003 Server x64, Windows Server 2008 x86 and Windows Server 2008 x64 and does NOT work the way described in the book.
If a program which is supposed to be THE solution does NOT solve the issue and DOES NOT work the way it is described, what about "normal" programs, which are not THE solution of anything?
I am wondering if any of the previous reviewers who claimed the beauty of DLL advanced techniques have ever tried any of the beauty of these techniques to see if they work the way this book claims they should.
Dennis L. Hughes said
Richter is _the_ expert in programming the Windows API. If you want to do that, then you must have this book. Besides content, it is well written and so forth.
This may not be for the complete beginner. Unfortunately, I don't know of any introductory texts on this subject. You kind of have to jump in.
You might find Microsoft Windows Internals (4th Edition): Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000 or Windows® Internals: Including Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, Fifth Edition (PRO-Developer) of use in understanding some concepts. But beware! Those are highly technical.
I also recommend Windows System Programming (3rd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Microsoft Technology Series) in addition to Richter. This is a very well-written and masterful presentation of much of the same material, but in a different way. It is amazing how much Hart packs into such a small book.
One caveat about Windows Via C/C++ 5. Richter has to quite an extent lost interest in native C++ in favor of C#/.NET. Perhaps for this reason this book has a cobbled-together feel, like the old version verbatum (which is fine) with some new material roughly tacked on. (BTW, Richter's CLR via C#, Second Edition (Pro Developer) is essential for .NET developers.)
Still, 5 stars.
S. Jacobson said
If you want to do any serious development in Window, this is the book to get. Once you read and understand the basic C++ books, and want to get beyond simple applications, you need this book. This is not a beginner text, but a grown-up book on what is happening inside windows and how to use it in your application. I found this book invaluable in building multithreading, port i/o, virtual array management in my application. The author really knows his stuff and presents it in a very readable fashion. The source code for the examples in this book are well-commented and I have found it easy to take code fragments from then to use in my applications.
This book is a keeper.
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