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Book Review
The Developers Guide to WINHELP.EXE by J Mischel
Recommended
ISBN: 0-471-3032-6       Publisher: Wiley       Pages: 382pp & disk       Price: £41-50
Categories:   MS Windows    
Reviewed by David Ross in C Vu 8-1 (Nov 1995)
I am a great fan of Windows help files. Apart from their obvious use, I have seen extremely interesting stand alone guides to the Internet, programming and hardware configuration - applications in their own right. This book describes the creation of Windows help files using the standard tools supplied with almost every Windows development environment. While the more specialist help authoring tools are mentioned, they are not covered in any great detail.

Starting with the construction of a very simple example help file, this book builds in a friendly, almost chatty, style to extremely complex help applications. Aside from the obvious topics (hypertext links, search and bitmaps) the help macro language, its programming API and design considerations are all covered. Examples, in Visual Basic, C and Pascal are all provided on the included disc.

I am not an expert in the help authoring, so perhaps that is why I got so much out of this book. However, the breadth of coverage left me in little doubt that there can't be much, if anything, that is not covered.

Thoroughly recommended. Even if you are using one of the higher-level tools, this book will provide a solid understanding of the underlying help application that you may need, especially for the more esoteric features. Hopefully a Win95 edition will be brought out soon.

Other Authors with the same surname

Mischel
Borland C++ Builder Programming Explorer by J Duntemann & J Mischel  (Reviewed May 1998)
Developers Guide to WINHELP.EXE, The by J Mischel [Recommended]  (Reviewed Mar 1995)
Macro Magic with Turbo Assembler by Jim Mischel [Recommended]  (Reviewed Jul 1993)

Last Update - 13 May 2001.

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