Customer Reviews

Inside Visual C++: With CDROM (Microsoft Programming Series)

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I Just picked up the book from a half price bookstore. It's one of the best buys I made in recent months. The writing style is concise and their explanations extremely clear. A "must buy" for anyone who wants to dive into Win32 programming using MFC. However this is not a book for everyone. It is ideal for intermediate programmers.

I'm an experienced C/C++ programmer who wants a quick way of learning VC++ and the Visual Studio 6.0 Development Environment. And this is THE BOOK! I would also recommend the book for seasoned XWindows/Motif programmers who need to learn the popular MFC Windows application framework for porting their applications. It covers in breadth (but not in great details) many topics related to the Win32 environment: Document-View Architecture, ActiveX, COM, ATL, ODBC, Winsock, etc. In essence, it gives a nice capability overview of the VC++ 6.0 development tools.

Like some negative reviews posted earlier, I have to warn that the ideal readers should have some prior knowledge about Win32 API or at least some prior exposure to event-driven programming style (Smalltalk experience, also a plus.) A nice companion book for Win32 programming is: "Windows 98 Programming from the Ground Up" by Herbert Schildt. It gives C programmers better understanding of the Win32 API underlying MFC.

This is NOT an introductory text, NOR an in-depth reference. It is a comprehensive tutorial that is extremely well written and enjoyable for seasoned programmers who are new to the Win32 environment. I can't wait to start learning DirectX SDK after reading this book. :-)

This book tries to cover topics, that are too complex to cover in 30-40 pages. For example when talking about multithreaded programming you could write a book of that size about it and there would still be question marks left to reader. Same applies to database programming, COM and other topics.

For a beginner it demands too much insight, for experience programmer it only scratches the surface. I guess the right group for this book are intermediate programmers. Those who have written application or two and read about some technology (for example COM) but never done it for real. They can use this book as a good introduction to some topic that saves them from reading 200+ pages of marketing driven MSDN docs to get the basics - but not as a reference, neither as an "in depth" source of information...

If you are trying to learn Windows programming using the MFC library, then this book is a great place to start. The book covers a lot of material and discusses how to put Visual C++ to work for you in the process. This book does, however, move fairly quickly. It is easy to follow and understand, but it sometimes skips some details that may be of interest. Therefore, I recommend using this book to learn MFC, but also have a copy of Jeff Prosise's "Programming Windows with MFC." Prosise's book is hands-down the best MFC book on the market, but it is so detailed that it is hard to read it from cover-to-cover. So, when you read this book and feel like you want to know more about the topic you just read, look to Prosise's book for more information. The two books make a great team.

The most important aspect of this book is that it is very readable. You can get through it cover to cover. The simple fact is that MFC is too big a topic for one book, or one author. I've had to use three books to learn it. My method has always been the same.

1. Find a book to read just to get a high level idea of what is going on. Normally, about a quarter to half way the high level book, it becomes superficial. In this case, that book was Teach Yourself Visual C++ in 21 Days.

2. Start reading a more complete book that will tell me what is going on. Originally, I started reading the Prosise book. Don't get me wrong, Prosise is a great reference, but its too detailed. MFC is too broad to learn every nuck and cranny. I shifted over to Programming VC++. It's perfect. It goes over every thing I need to know. If I need more detail, I use Prosise for reference. But this is the book I read cover to cover.

MFC is tough. This book might not teach you everything. But it will give you enough information to know what to look up in Prosise.

Six months ago I spent some time scratching my head over this book. Now I can follow most of its contents - but I'd say that the fledgling C++ programmer needs to read Prosise first. Prosise doesn't rely on the wizards as much as Kruglinski, and explains just about every line of code in his sample programs. Kruglinski has more samples, and goes much further with COM, Internet and database applications, but pitches in at too advanced a level for anyone making the transition from pure C++ to Visual C++. But AFTER Prosise, this is the next one to get stuck into!

This is a good book to learn how to code in MFC. The biggest drawback of this book is that it does not mention the MFC application architecture in the begining at all. So the reader is immediately starts coding whithout knowing what the MFc is actually doing for him. I have very strong experience in developing windows applications under the Win32 SDK and I believe that this book should have discussed the MFC message maping and application architecture before writing any code (at least). Overall, i think the book is okay. Personnely, I like "Professional MFC With Visual C++ 6
by Mike Blaszczak" better.

I'm a big fan of examples and this book has plenty of them. Also all examples are shown how to develop using the Class Wizard which is what most programmers will be using these days. I use this book 10 times more than all of my C++ books. This is a must have for your typical programmer.

This book claims to be teaching almost all aspects of Visual C++ 6.0. In reality, it should be named "Programming VC++ with MFC and Overview of the rest of the technologies.". I read this book from cover to cover and I felt good about it until I got to Part III. After that it was just boring and difficult to read it, because the style of explaination of the topic was far from the one that covered MFC. It just felt that the author(s) were in a hurry fo the deadline.

In my opinion, the worst part of this book is the one that attempts to cover programming for the Internet.

Thus, for covering MFC I give 5 stars, and 1 start for the other topics.

'The Industry Bible,' it tells you on the back cover. This book is a fine summary of the many things possible with VC, but is positively useless as a reference. A casual glance through the index might hint at a comprehensive reference, but turn to the referenced page and you'll find it won't tell you anything at all about what his code is doing. 'What does this function do? What does that function do?' The book is rife with decent examples but doesn't TEACH you ANYTHING. That is, try to do something that combines examples printed in the book and you shoot yourself in the foot, and the book is silent about what to do then. This book is miserable if you're just beginning to code for Windows (or using VC).

I am an experienced C++ programmer, but have given up after 8 chapters of this book. The author offers reams of code with little explanation. Particularly annoying is the constant introduction of MFC functions with little explanation of what they do, and skimpy discussion of what the applications do. It may be OK for a more experienced VC++ programmer, or if you want to spend endless weeks grinding through code that you can only marginally understand.

Question -- why doesn't someone write a guide that provides sample problem applications -- that would certainly facilitate the learning process.