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Mastering Windows Programming with Borland C++ 4 by Tom Swan Recommended

ISBN: 0-672-30312-4       Publisher: Sams       Pages: 678pp+disk       Price: £37-60

Categories:   borland     MS Windows     advanced c++

Reviewed by Peter Wippell in C Vu 7-1 (Nov 1994)

Mastering Windows Programming is a 'how to do it' text book, based on a group of example programs, carefully chosen to bring out the basic mechanisms of OWL. After explaining what you need to know to compile and run the examples provided on disk, using either the IDE or the Command Line tools, each example is listed and then explained. You don't need previous Windows knowledge, though you will want to delve deeper into Windows as you read it.

Tom Swan is one of the small group of C/C++ authors - Scott Meyers and Charles Petzold are two others - who can write a book which is enjoyable to read, as well as being sound technically. I had no difficulty in reading this one from cover to cover! Furthermore the material forms a much needed complement to Borland's examples, most of which are hardly explained at all and which suffer from too big a gap between the simple and advanced, wherein the book's listings neatly fit. Tom Swan actually wrote Borland's original 'printing' example, which only prints a single page. In the book, he provides a second version in much more intelligible code and adds a new multipage printing example. Curiously, this contains the only two mistakes I found in the code. The computation of page size is in error and also the font defaults in pages after the first.

Although in most cases the error trapping code is omitted for brevity, there is the best practical treatment of exceptions I have yet seen.

No attempt is made to teach the Application or Class Experts on the sensible grounds that you shouldn't try, until you can write basic OWL programs.

Fully recommended to anyone, like me, in the early stages of OWL 2. I found that it filled considerable gaps in my understanding and I expect to continue to study it for some time to come.