Saturday, October 07, 2006

Three Books Every Windows Programmer Should Own

Today I'm going to be reviewing some of what I think are the most important books for any aspiring C/C++ Windows programmer.

Programming Windows Fifth Edition
by Charles Petzold
This book is truly the Windows programming bible. Petzold covers all the basics of a Windows application, such as, events and messages, the GDI, and dialog boxes. The book also hits on some advanced Windows programming like multiple-document interfaces, multithreading, and creating and using DLLs.

Advanced Windows Third Edition
by Jeffrey Richter
Jeffrey Richter is in the know when it comes to Windows architecture and programming. The first few chapters cover architecture topics like kernal objects, and memory architecture. The later chapters he moves on to programming topics such as advanced memory management, multithreading, structured exception handling (SEH), and many other advanced topics not covered anywhere else. This book is a must for any serious Windows programmer.
Note: There's a fourth edition of this book titled Programming Applications for Microsoft Windows that covers Windows 2000 and some 64bit programming topics. This book, however; is out of print (though I'm not sure why) and fairly expensive even on auction networks such as Ebay.

Network Programming for Microsoft Windows
by Anthony Jones and Jim Ohlund
Not a part of the Win32 API, but still very much a core part of Windows. Network Programming is the offical reference for the Winsock 2 API (besides MSDN). While I don't compleately agree with the author's writting style, or programming methods, this book provides an excelent overview.

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