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Windows Internals by Matt Pietrek Recommended

ISBN: 0-201-62217-3       Publisher: Addison-Wesley       Pages: 525pp       Price: £24.95

Categories:   internals and hardware     MS Windows

Reviewed by Roger Woollett in C Vu 6-5 (Jul 1994)

Pietrek clearly states his intended audience. The book is intended for experienced Windows programmers who already understand matters such as protected mode, segments, DPMI, etc. Wisely he restricts the book to new material and does not go over background topics. He also rules out a number of potentially interesting subjects such as VxDs, Virtual Machines and DOS boxes due to lack of space.

Since Microsoft have published very little on the internals of Windows Pietrek has had to piece together the story from a mixture of sources, strangely omitting the MSDN CD-ROM, but mostly from the code itself. Much of the book is directly the result of disassembling the kernel, GDI and user DLLs. This could leave us with a mass of detail but without any framework to fit it into, but fortunately most chapters contain a reasonable background discussion. He provides pseudo code for most of the API functions he discusses. Some areas, notably in the GDI have evidently defeated his efforts to unravel the code but he has succeeded with a great deal.

The book concentrates on Windows 3.1 enhanced mode but has some mention of variants such as standard mode and Windows for Workgroups. The main topics are: startup and shutdown, memory management, processes, windows, GDI, scheduling and messages.

Since, like most people, I avoid undocumented features and do have the full SDK documentation why do I like the book? I like to have some idea of the internals of operating systems I use for the same reason that I get some satisfaction from knowing a little about the internals of the cars I drive. Also the standard SDK manuals may tell you the arguments to use but I am often left unsure of just what they do. This book sometimes sheds some additional light. In the absence of proper documentation from Microsoft, which we are unlikely to get, this provides the best alternative.