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Title: Programming Applications for Microsoft Windows (Dv-Mps General) by Jeffrey Richter ISBN: 1572319968 Publisher: Microsoft Press Pub. Date: October, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $59.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.47
Rating: 5
Summary: Black Belt Windows Programming Book
Comment: Advanced Windows is bettered by the fourth edition . This book is the most detailed under the hood treatment of Windows system programming and the best book of multithreading on the shelves today. If you want to really be a master guru Windows developer and not have the high level superficial just need to know now to get by skill, this book is the source for under the hood knowledge. No sissies, not for MFC wannabees, or MFC GUIs developers, not for wimps but for hard core Windows developers. The only knock on this book is a lack of coverage on RPC, Sockets, and Services. If you need coverage of these topics couple this Richter title with Marshall Brains classic Win32 System services. With these two books there is no other windows books you need. Then perhaps you can go to the MFC books, say MFC interals.
Rating: 4
Summary: Timely successor to "Advanced Windows"
Comment: Edition 3 of this book, under the title "Advanced Windows" was such a classic that it rapidly vanished from bookshops. For love or money, no copy could be bought anywhere, and want of any alternative, serious programmers had to beg, borrow or steal a copy to do any real Windows programming.
Rather than reprint, it seems that Microsoft press preferred a new edition, and indeed, it is substantially different from the previous one. It even has a new name, albeit so bland one has no idea what is inside the book. The material has been completely rearranged, and the code samples rewritten, often using C++.
So what is new?
Well, there is the now-obligatory chapter on Unicode, quite unnecessary since it gets more than exhaustive coverage in Petzold's heavily overweight "Programming Windows", fifth edition, where it belongs.
There are chapters on new Windows features, such as Jobs, whereby several processes can be grouped together and have common properties, Fibers, good for fast porting UNIX multithreaded applications to Windows, and Thread Pooling, whereby a pool of threads can be reused without creating and destroying the threads each time.
There are also expanded sections on kernel objects, threads, processes, scheduling, synchronization (possibly a bit overdone), memory architecture and management, memory mapped files, exception handling, basic and advanced dll topics. In all these cases the coverage is extensive and excellent, with full analysis and explanation of what really happens under the hood of the operating system.
Those who regularly read the columns of Pietrek and Richter in Microsoft Systems Journal will recognize some of that material gathered together here. Where necessary, there is also excellent psudo-code showing how the operating system works.
Well, who needs this stuff?
Not a programmer making a simple application with a vanilla GUI. For that, Petzold's "Programming Windows" and Prosise's MFC provide more than enough excellent material. This book is meant for those who need to write power applications, which harness the full potential of the operating system, and even overcome some of its serious bugs and shortcomings. Its hard to understand why Windows is doing things wrong, and write workarounds, unless you have a good idea of what it is meant to be doing. Richter explains very clearly how it is supposed to do its work, and often how to make it cleverer. The first time I saw "Advanced Windows" I wondered who ever needed this stuff, now his books are permanent residents on my desk.
So why do I give it 4 stars, unlike all other reviewers who give it a 5?
Richter writes this book for Windows 2000 and 98, with not a word about NT and 95. Now, 98 is just 95 warmed over, and 2000 is NT 4 tweaked a bit, so most of what he writes is directly applicable. However, there are more advanced functions, and topics, which do not exist on Windows 95, or worse, exist but behave differently (such as the Interlocked function group), and some modules, such as Toolhelp, which exist on 9x and Win2000, but not NT. Microsoft is welcome to introduce new functions, but it is hard to use them if one is writing an application for home users, many of whom will be using 95 for several more years. And unless Microsoft offers us all free upgrades from 95 to 98, and from NT to 2000, we will not be able to safely use these functions for several years yet. I expect any Microsoft reference book such as this one to at least point out these quirks. Instead, there is not a word of warning as to which of the functions it so happily recommends do not exist under the old versions of Windows, and therefore cannot be used by most of its readers. Sorry Richter, no full marks from me, but fix this problem, and I'll give you a 5!
Rating: 4
Summary: Great Book, Some Style Hurdles
Comment: This book would have been better titled "Advanced Windows Programming Topics" because with the exception of the chapter on Unicode and the three chapters on Structured Exception Handling, it covers topics that come into play in the advanced stages of specific types of application development. It is not nearly as generally applicable as the title suggests. For instance, it handles virtual memory and memory-mapped files, but not basic memory management. It handles advanced Windows messaging topics, but not any UI programming. It does not cover I/O or many universally required items such as strings, time, etc. in either their C standard library, C++/MFC class library, or ATL template library forms. It also does not cover higher-level info like COM, networking, etc. which are where many new technologies live (ADO, ADSI, SOAP, XML, Internet, etc.)
It is very Win32-specific and heavily slanted toward Visual C++. I think it is a great fit with Inside Windows 2000, because many of the advanced topics covered from the programming perspective here are also covered from the internal system operation perspective there.
These are not so much problems as they are a level-set for your expectations. There are plenty of other great books on the topics not included here.
There were three distractions that plagued this book. First, there is far too much source code printed in the book. There is a CD and there are code snippets in the text (in addition to the complete source code later in the chapter). This was far too redundant and caused quite a bit of page flipping. Although it is quite interesting and beneficial to examine source code, its placement in this book just interrupts the flow of reading. Second, there is quite a bit of useless discussion on what doesn't work, including rambling sections on the many failed attempts the author had before achieving success on a topic. This was also a distraction. It would have been better presented as the correct way of doing things with admonitions on what not to do and possibly why. The blow-by-blow description of the process used to discover these things was too frequent and became annoying. Third, there were similar sections that were less about the author's own exploits but just as overdone. Most of these focused on examining what could happen if you didn't code correctly. They would start with a basic statement of what could go wrong, but then went on to beat the concept into the ground by devoting paragraphs to aspects of the ramifications that are completely obvious to anyone in this book's target audience. There is some value to this last type of analysis, as it can help the thought process required for hard-target debugging, but these should have been in a debugging chapter rather than drawn out and placed with the rest of the text.
In spite of these hurdles in style, the book covers topics that are absolutely essential for robust application development. It covers Unicode, Processes, Threads, Synchronization, Memory Management, DLLs, Exceptions, and certain advanced Windows UI topics. For every topic covered, the coverage was authoritative. The author has a great understanding of the topics covered and manages to cover nearly the entirety of a topic without it seeming like a reference guide. In that, it is extraordinarily well done. I have since adopted several important best practices in synchronization, thread management, DLLs, and so forth. Every topic was rife with great information.
For the topics covered, this is one of the best books I've read. This is an extremely valuable book and a definite must read, but not until after you are quite well versed in "Programming Applications for Windows" ironically.
As a final note, if you're thinking of reading this book, you will thoroughly enjoy reading the author's Programming Server-Side Applications for Windows as well. It has the same source code redundancy issue, but is much leaner in the other aspects of style. It covers many excellent server-side topics like services and performance-enabling your applications. In addition, it offers the best coverage of scalable asynchronous I/O and the best coverage of Win2K security that I've ever read.
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Title: Programming Windows, Fifth Edition by Charles Petzold ISBN: 157231995X Publisher: Microsoft Press Pub. Date: 11 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $59.99 |
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Title: Programming Windows With MFC by Jeff Prosise ISBN: 1572316950 Publisher: Microsoft Press Pub. Date: 13 May, 1999 List Price(USD): $59.99 |
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Title: Inside Microsoft Windows 2000 (Microsoft Programming Series) by David A. Solomon, Mark Russinovich ISBN: 0735610215 Publisher: Microsoft Press Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $49.99 |
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Title: Programming Server-Side Applications for Microsoft Windows 2000 by Jeffrey Richter, Jason D. Clark ISBN: 0735607532 Publisher: Microsoft Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $49.99 |
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Title: Win32 System Programming: A Windows(R) 2000 Application Developer's Guide (2nd Edition) by Johnson M. Hart ISBN: 0201703106 Publisher: Addison Wesley Professional Pub. Date: 29 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $56.99 |
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