Olivier Langlois's blog

This book is fine but I have prefered the book ADO: ActiveX Data Objects by Jason T. Roff for its numerous source code samples.

This is a very old book dating from Windows 3.1 era. It walks you through the methodology one could take to encapsulate the Windows API in a C++ framework. Most of the information contained in the book is still accurate today except for one chapter related to memory management.

This book covers in details the GDI API and the DirectDraw API. Even if it was written for Windows 2000, it is safe to assume that these APIs have not changed much in Windows XP. The source code samples contain mistakes but it remains an excellent reference. I recommend this out of print book because you can probably get it for a very cheap price.

It does a very good job at describing the Win32 API for multithreading but the applications of multithreading assumed is strictly I/O related (Networking, printing, writing/reading files). The set of techniques for parallel processing on the same data is completely absent such as data organization in memory to optimize its parallel access. This is probably due to the age of the book as when it has been written, single core processor system was the norm. Parallel processing will become very important with the growing popularity of the multi core systems. Despite this weakness, this book is still my best recommendation for learning multithreaded programming on Windows since, to my knowledge, there is not yet any book tackling the subject of parallel processing on a Windows/x86 platform.

The difference between this book and Programming Windows with MFC is that while the latter provides a complete reference on how to use MFC, it does not cover much what is going inside MFC. You might ask why should care about how MFC works? If you remember the first time you used MFC, you might remember your astonishment about how quick you could have a working decent application in five minutes just by using the MFC wizard but after that joyful moment, you spent frustrating weeks to figure out how to do add this special feature to your program. Lets face it, the documentation coming with MFC does not tell everything you have to know to fully unleash the power of MFC. The only way to truly understand MFC is to dig in the code (For Star Wars fans, Obi-Wan would say "Use the source, Luke") and this is precisely why Microsoft is providing the MFC source code. MFC source code is huge and might be intimidating at first. This is why having a book to help you in the first steps of your exploration is an excellent idea. Consider having this book as a companion for Programming Windows for MFC. However, this book is not for novices. Only buy it, if you consider yourself good with programming MFC.

If you buy it, very interesting discoveries await you! You can see by yourself by looking my MFC tutorials on my website what the knowledge contained in this book has allowed me to do with MFC.