Customer Reviews

Developing International Software for Windows 95 and Windows NT (Microsoft Programming Series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

An excellent first book for students of localization, although it is highly focused. Good discussion of Windows programming and the Windows interface, dated with the arrival of NT 4.0. She covers double-byte effectively, though not in the depth you'll find in, say, Ken Lunde's O'Reilly title on Japanese. She skips over BiDirectional (the next challenge, I think) entirely. Highly recommended anyway, if for nothing else, then for the hundreds of pages of useful tables (Where else can you get the French/Arabic code page?)

While working on a software project that would be released in multiple countries, I started thinking about the issues that arise when developing international software. As a result, I found myself purchasing this book.

Simply stated, this isn't a "how to" book, but a reference with a verbose introduction. In fact, over half of the book (494 pages) are in the form of appendices. The remainder of the book is a high-level look at internationalization, and one that I didn't find all that informative.

What this book does have is information you won't find anywhere else, such as keyboard layouts, and codepages in foreign languages.

Although the book is not new, and does not cover Linux/Unix and Java issues, it has been a unique source of information in my international software development. I was happy when I inherited this book from a colleague, and I keep it open on my table. It contains, for instance, all the codepages that I ever heard of.

Nadine Kano also recommends the book "SW Internationalization and Localization" by Uren, Howard, Perinotti.

Nadine Kono, Microsoft Developer Relations Group, author of this excellent book, was one of the reviewers of the book "SW Internationalization and Localization: An Introduction" by Van Nostrand Reinhold,