Customer Reviews

Communications Programming for Windows 95 (Microsoft Programming Series)

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I bought this book hoping to learn all that I needed to know to create some "killer" TAPI applications. The results of reading this book, however, are mixed.

First off, the author does a wonderful job of giving the details for handling the various anatomy of telphony: calls, addresses, lines, etc. There are detailed explainations of what the data structures involved and the necessary API calls for gettting/setting these properties. In fact, it seemed that the details went on and on...but this could be just because of the depth of the subject. Nevertheless, the treatment of this material as good and all the information is there.

As for writing "killer apps" after reading this book, I do not feel this is a reality (at least in a decent amount of time). The book does not give a very good presentation on how "it all fits together." The sample application showed how to simply take the phone off the hook and dial a phone number. Wow... I would have much rather preferred some more treatment on how to transfer data across a line once a connection is established.

Finally, the section on MAPI was only 21 pages long! (the book was 400 pages) If you want to get serious about MAPI, I would suggest looking elsewhere.

I bought this book to study how to use TAPI to handle data communication task. But this book is poorly designed. You cannot understand the TAPI clearly with this book. Poor example and lacking enought information on TAPI....

I bought this book to learn about TAPI. It does not provide much more than MSDN on this topic. The sample code is also not explained very well.

Im writing a file transfer program to transfer data over the serial port using a NULL modem cable. This books helps a little. However, the explanations on P.54 about RTS/CTS hardware flow control I find quite confusing. The author seems to contradict himself. Other than that the book seems to explain other things descently and overall is an easy read.