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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 Lester J Devaney in C Vu 7-3 (Mar 1995)

The book has program examples in C, Pascal and Visual Basic. I haven't been through the Pascal texts nor the Visual Basic texts.

The book is an introduction to the Microsoft Windows Help system. It is targeted at technical writers as well as programmers and is a vade-mecum on the practicalities of making a help file and getting it to display correctly. Some design issues and technical writing issues are discussed briefly, but this book is not a philosophical one.

Most of the examples are in the RTF page description language as the DLL files are used as extensions to the facilities of the Windows Help system and on the diskette the author has provided working copies of these DLLS. Note -I haven't asked the author about distribution policy - there might not be one!

Overall, the book is thorough and does a good job of introducing the reader to the Windows Help system. The progression is well organised and the examples are tutorially complete. However, there are errors in the text that would confuse some and the file 'erratum.txt' lists the important ones. Two of the errors are that two include files are not documented and so I have provided them with this review.

In my view if you don't actually do the examples you will not get any benefit from the book. The author makes a point early on that doing the examples in native RTF gives you a feel for what is sensible and what might be suspect. Also, there are some things that probably aren't available through a tool such as Word for Windows or Help Writers' Assistant for Windows - a product from New Zealand - and for which you would need to 'patch' the output from a tool before compiling it.

If you want to make help files tick, I thoroughly recommend this book as your starting point. It's important to note that the author claims to have corrected documentation errors when compiling his own appendixes. However, if programming you probably would still need the use of Microsoft's own documentation.

The files accompanying this review are (on this issues disk):

erratum.txt - a list of significant errors in the book.

find.rh - a missing file.

helping.txt - a list of tools for creating help files.

shell.h - a missing file.

summary.txt - a summary of what is in the book.