Windows programming books

[agnitrate]

I'm looking for a good book to teach me how to use Windows programming, specifically dialog applications that use controls. I am not sure if I should be looking for a book that strictly does win32 or if I should learn how to use MFC (it seems very confusing after reading through some tutorials!).

Does anybody have any good book suggestions either way?

-silver

 

[Mucman]

The Programming Windows books by Charlse Petzold are pretty good. That's how I learned the basics of Win32 programming. Perhaps .Net or Delphi is the way to go now though.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Petzold is the win32 control / UI book, and worth having to understand what's happening behind the scenes in MFC and .Net

MFC makes building a dialog-based app a little easier than raw Win32, the message routing is really simplified and a bit more object-oriented. Instead of having a massive case statement you write message-handler functions for button cliicks. My favorite MFC book is: Programming Windows With MFC by Jeff Prosise

.Net is probably the wave of the future, even though for a web-distributed app forcing people to install the monster .Net framework is a big minus.

 

[agnitrate]

I'm not really aware of the differences in .NET. I know there is C#, but is there a new API as well (such as MFC) to be used? I thought I read that they were porting most of the MFC stuff over for .NET as well.

I'm going to check out my school's library tomorrow to see if they have those books. I have heard in the past that they were good, but couldn't justify spending $60 on them :Q I pay enough for my school books that their library damn well better have it

Thanks for the 411!

-silver

 

[stephbu]

Start on Petzold - definitely agree he's *the* place to start. Programming Windows should be on every Windows developer's bookshelf - even if they do .NET apps - just so they understand what .NET does under the hood at the moment. It'll teach you a broad swathe of Win32 UI development stuff.

Move on to Jeff Richter's series of books Programming Applications for Win32, Advanced Windows Programming, and Programming Server-side for Windows 2000. These will teach you pretty much everything you need to know to make Win32 logo-ready robust multithreaded applications and services.

If after that you fancy seeing some history - Brockschmidt's Inside OLE book is the COM/OLE Bible. Books by Don Box and Chris Sells will help turn that text into practice. For MFC Jeff Prosise and Mike Blaszczak both wrote excellent books.

If you're interested in moving on to deep .NET programming, I'd suggest you'd get a lot more mileage by knowing Win32 API too - but to dive straight in and pick a language - most have CLR/.NET equivalents. If you know Java (or to some extent C/C++) take C# - you'll find it really easy to get into. Eric Gunnerson's book is a great intro to C# syntax - and Jeff Richter's Applied Framework book is pretty damn good intro into calling .NET Framework types.

As for the other flavours .NET languages - I'm not so sure - but I've no doubt that you'll be able to find something to meet your tastes. Most of the books I'd recommend have been written by people who either work or have worked at Microsoft on the languages - they have less regurgitation of MSDN, more original information.

I have most of these on my bookshelf still - and one or two are still in good use even after moving on to CLR/.NET development around 4 years ago.