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Undocumented Windows by A Schulman Recommended

ISBN: 0-201-60834-0       Publisher: Addison-Wesley       Pages: 715pp+disk       Price: £32-70

Categories:   MS Windows     internals and hardware

Reviewed by Francis Glassborow in C Vu 5-1 (Nov 1992)

The book covers a multitude of undocumented calls and unlisted aspects of documented functions. It covers both retail versions and debug ones.

The book only covers the KERNEL, USER and GDI. DPMI, virtual device drivers, virtual machine manager and a whole gamut of other low level areas are reserved for another book.

By publishing this book the authors go some way to levelling the playing field between commercial developers with inside knowledge and the rest who struggle on with only the information provided in the SDK and DDK.

I could bore many of you but I will confine myself encouraging those programming seriously for Windows to get a copy of this book into your work place. You may choose for a variety of reasons to avoid undocumented functions but keep in mind that many of the undocumented functions in 3.0 became documented in 3.1. Why let Microsoft and the big boys take advantage of secret knowledge? If they use the calls they will have to maintain them in future releases.

The Book includes a 3.5" HD disk with all the source code from the book and a raft of useful utilities.

Recommended to serious developers and good old fashioned code hackers.