Customer Reviews

Developing Professional Applications for Windows 98 and NT Using MFC

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

 

 

Very happy with this book. If you're a multi-platform professional who is looking to learn, Know and deliver product using MFC in the least amount of time, this is the ticket.

Pros:

-Good, "show me" examples. Nothing left out.

-Organizes and enhances, not repeats, the VC++ documentation

-Covers both MFC -AND- Visual Studio's app tools, which are tightly intertwined.

- Covers a lot of 'professional' techniques needed to ship real product, like tweaking stock classes by self-drawing, etc.

Cons:

- Wish it were longer.

- The author constantly spews about how Wonderful MFC is. Every fifth sentence talks about how great, easy, powerful, simple, etc the facet of MFC being discussed is. Either the author's never used another framework before, or he's Bill's love slave. Now that the book's done, send him back over to Sales. Please.

That said, it's still a fine book.

This book teaches techniques in MFC programming and begins with a simple "Hello World" program that is written from the ground up and does not use the Visual C++ Appwizard and, consistently, MFC programming is taught, to a certain point in the book, without using the Appwizard generated code thus teaching MFC at a more fundamental level. Moreover, the book teaches how to add flare to you're applications with professional enhancements, one example being how to display an expanding dialog box.

I tend to collect books on Visual C++/MFC programming and I can attest that, in my opinion, this is one of the better ones written. Finally, the last chapter on threads is one of the first chapters on threads that I have read and fully understood - the authors are quite professional. Unfortunately, the year is 2005 and the website for the book appears to be now defunct. Even so, my guess is that the book is still relevant to the field, at the very least a primer to MFC, albeit an earlier version

This is a exteremly good book. I liked his approach of explaining every thing from
DOS and unix perspective and connecting to Win32 and MFC. I am a dos and x-windows
programmer. I did not got a chance to working in any win32 programming. Now like
most of others forced into the wintel world. This book gives excellent insight of
win32 and MFC. The examples are very good.

Another interesting thing is his approach to the class wizard. I have tried to use
class wizard before reading the book. I hated class wizard. I like to
know the every line in my program. I would prefer to type it myself. This book starts
with the concept of typing the code and slowing moves into class wizard. This books
explains want exactly class wizard does. It made me really comfortable with class wizard.

I haven't even finished this book yet, but it's excellent. It teaches you MFC without using the AppWizards and, in the appendix, with them. It's very indepth. The only downside to the book is that it's written exclusively for VC++, but that's what I liked about it. While other books on MFC I have concentrated on MFC coding, leaving you to figure out how to get resources working, etc., this book shows you step by step how to get it done, preventing you from getting lost. I have since switched to reading this book on MFC!

I was disappointed to learn that a publisher like Prentice Hall would ship a book without scanning the CD-ROM for viruses. The book content looks very good but it is not worth buying a book, installing the CD-ROM only later to find it trashed your computer. Thank goodness my scanning software caught it in time. Granted, Prentice Hall will exchange the CD-ROM for a new one, but they should have mentioned that in their statements here at Amazon.