Olivier Langlois's blog

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.

This book is considered as the windows programming bible by many. Sure, you can build applications without all this knowledge with frameworks such as MFC but if you are looking to build a Windows program that do exactly what you want, there is no workaround a deep Win32 API knowledge. This book is a must for all Windows programmers bookshelf.

Something you need to know before purchasing this book is that it is very unlikely that the author will update this gem one more time as Microsoft is slowly phasing out the Win32 API in favor of the .NET framework and this will be even more real when Vista comes out. However, since there is a huge codebase of existing Win32 programs, the Win32 API will certainly stay around for a long long time. This book is simply the best for learning Win32 programming. I still refer to it very frequently. If you are looking for a reference book on Win32 API, this is the one you were looking for.

This is the most detailed book that I know about GDI programming. If you have the courage to go through this brick (it is about the same size than Programming Windows and Programming Windows With MFC), your understanding of GDI will be greatly improved.

I have loved this book. It is much more easier to read than the more detailed book Windows Internals but still give you a good overall understanding on how Windows works. After having read this book, the cryptic access violation error messages suddenly made more sense. The most enlightning chapters of the book are the ones discussing how the OS manages the process memory space and how a process is launched. Do not get fooled thinking that because the book is on NT that its information is outdated. Not much has changed since and its content is still accuratly accurate.