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Inside Visual C++ by David Kruglinski Recommended

ISBN: (1-55615-891-)       Publisher: Microsoft Press       Pages: 896pp & CD       Price: £41.99

Categories:   microsoft     MS Windows

Reviewed by Chris Simons in C Vu 9-1 (Nov 1996)

The book is divided into six parts. Part one gently introduces the MFC application framework, while part two explores the view class, graphics programming, memory management and multithreaded programming. Part three discusses the document-view architecture, multiple document interface (MDI) and dynamic linked libraries. Part four looks as OLE while part five examines database management (ODBC and DAO). Part six offers appendices covering a crash course in C++ and popular MFC macros.

The above paragraph may read like a catalogue of a large application framework, but the topics addressed cover a vast quantity of application programming. The book is 896 pages long, reflecting the huge amount of material covered. In my view the depth of coverage is about right--a rich tutorial guide for the learner yet sufficiently deep for the experienced programmer to refer to. For example, chapter 21 covers DLLs. Starting with fundamentals--imported and exported functions and classes--the discussion proceeds to compare explicit versus implicit linkage, symbolic versus ordinal linkage, instance handles, extension DLLs versus regular DLLs and finishes with a custom control DLL example with full and accurate source code listings.

What is there to recommend this book over numerous others in the area? Well, the book appears to be technically accurate, as might be expected from an author who was part of the original Visual C++ team. Also, in my view, the book achieves a good balance between narrative, source code listings, screen drawings and sidebars. This skilful balance allows the book to be genuinely useful to learning and more experienced programmers alike and it is for its usefulness that I recommend this book, even at a price of £42.