ACCU Reviews: Programming Windows (Second Edition)

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Book Review

Programming Windows (Second Edition) by Charles Petzold
Highly Recommended

ISBN: 1-55615-264 Publisher: Microsoft Press Pages: ?pp Price: £27.95

Categories: MS Windows

Reviewed by unknown in C Vu 3-6 (Sep 1991)

It is impossible to ignore the future of Graphical User Interfaces (G.U.I.s), since the early days of Apple's intuitive windowing operating system for the Macintosh their popularity and availability has snowballed. Windows is Microsoft's G.U.I. for the IBM PC and compatibles, first released in November 1985 it wasn't until Nov 1988 with the release of version 2 that it became a credible operating platform, and again not until May 1990 with the release of Windows 3 that it became a realistic alternative to the likes of Apple's Macintosh.

Charles Petzold first wrote his introduction to programming windows in early
1988 for windows release 2 (Windows 286). This second edition represents a complete revision of his work to bring the information up-to-date with Windows 3. Most chapters have undergone fairly major update, with the first few chapters almost completely re-written to reflect the new development utilities available and a further two chapters added to document features specific to Windows 3; Dynamic Data Exchange (D.D.E.) and the Multi Document Interface (M.D.I.).

The book presumes that you will have both Microsoft's official Windows 3 software development kit (SDK.) and Microsoft C version 6.0. All of the example code (and there is plenty of it) is given in ANSI compliant C. It is expected that the reader is fluent with C and ideally they should have some knowledge of programming the PC architecture with particular reference to segmentation considerations. It is not however expected that the reader will have any prior knowledge of the internal organisation and operation of a G.U.I.

Despite the wealth of information supplied by Microsoft with both their C compiler and the SDK, this book fills a much needed gap. The Microsoft documentation is primarily reference material and as such can easily leave you wondering how and where to start. Programming Windows offers the solution to this by adopting a tutorial approach. With no attempt to document the complete function set of windows the book is left free to concentrate on explaining the concepts of programming windows. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book to anyone considering developing for windows, it is extremely well written, very easy to read, and with it's practical approach, offers a true insight into getting your code to work with windows.

Other Authors with the same surname

Petzold
Extending DOS (Second Edition) by Ray Duncan & Charles Petzold [Recommended] (Reviewed May 1992)
Programming Windows 95 (4e) by Charles Petzold (Reviewed Sep 1995)
Programming Windows 95 by Charles Petzold [Recommended] (Reviewed Sep 1996)

Last Update - 13 May 2001.

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