Customer Reviews

The MFC Answer Book: Solutions for Effective Visual C++ Applications

5 star:		(46)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I now own four Visual C++ books, and after a year or so of programming with MFC, this is often the book I turn to first. When you've used MFC for a while, you realize that if your application fits exactly into the mold forseen by the MFC programmers, your job is a snap. But I've never had an application quite like that. There is always something that has to be different from the straight-and-narrow path. This book is the first line of defence for how to deal with those tweaks.

Many of the questions that this book answers cannot be answered by reading Microsoft's documentation (this is not particularly a slam at Microsoft: the system is just too huge to document everything to the last detail), and the only real way to answer them is to read the source code for MFC. Luckily for us, Eugene Kain has done this. A great feature of the book is that he gives both cookbook recipes to achieve a required tweak, AND an explanation of the relevant source code, so that you gain an understanding of how you might do something similar-but-not-quite-the-same.

My only complaint is that I want volume II, volume III, ...!

I recommend this book to all the (Unix background) programmers in my center that are starting to use Visual C++.

Audience: Intermediate and above.

Chapter 0 - Terminology and Conventions

Chapter 1 - Document/View Architecture Backgrounder

Chapter 2 - Documents and Document Templates

- Managing Document Templates

- Managing Documents

- Managing the Recent Files list (MRU)

- Miscellaneous Items

Chapter 3 - Views and Frame Windows

- General Topics

- Opening and Closing Views and Frame Windows

- Managing Sizes and Positions

- Managing Caption, Icons, Cursors, and Backgrounds

- Form Views

- Splitter Windows

- Switching Views

- Miscellaneous Items

Chapter 4 - Dialog Boxes

- General Topics

- Managing Controls in a Dialog Box

Chapter 5 - Property Sheet

- General Topics

- Managing Tabs

- Embedding Property Sheets

Chapter 6 - Toolbars and Status Bars

- Toolbars

- Status Bars

- General Control Bar Topic

Chapter 7 - Menus

Chapter 8 - Printing and Print Preview

Appendix A - Utility Functions and Classes

This book is not about teaching MFC basics or fundamentals, it's all about hints and tricks that answers the question ... have you ever wondered how to do this in MFC? I sat down over the week-end for about several hours looking though the book and found it to be very helpful. It doesn't bog you down with large sample code, but it gives you snippets of code that just goes straight to the point.. Be aware this book is not for beginners, but you don't have to be an expert on MFC to understand this book either. This is definitely a keeper for me and I suspect that some time in the future will come in handy as a good reference book.

I have EVERY bible on MFC. professional mfc, windows withh mfc visual c++ inside but I found this book the most valuable. Instead of bombarding you with jargon and theorie this book can help you learn a lot better than others, for a great deal i do not care about mfc internals casue I DO NOT HAVE THE TIME to learn everything MFC is suppposed to be a library to USE not to completle dissect , sometimes you just have to accept certain things and work wiht them, I wont deny that I just copy and pase a lot from the examples..but even then its easy to see where you are heading and whats actually happening as the source is very good commented, the author even helped me wiht a serious problem.. you wwant somethign else than the usual boring looking mfc stuff..check this one out...

This book is written in a question and answer format, just like a FAQ. Although the content predominantly revolves around documents and views, many other common questions are also answered.

Personally, I love the format and the content. I hate having to weed through several huge books to find an answer to a simple question. I loaned out my previous copy, and it wasn't returned. I ended up buying another copy.

While this book won't make you a guru, it just might save you an hour of frustration. Since I migrate between operating systems, APIs, and SDKs, I never put in the time to earn the title of MFC Guru, so this book comes in handy, especially when it comes to refreshing my memory, without having to plow through the MFC code.

Unfortunately, this book is not all-inclusive, as many questions are left out. The "new" controls are left out entirely. However, even with the omissions, the book will give you a straight answer or point you in the right direction about 90% of the time.

Highly recommended.

I can highly recommend this book to everyone. This is definitely the way to go - just look up your question and turn to the answer page. It couldn't be easier. This book can save you days in searching for an answer to a problem. You won't only find the answer, but also an explanation of what the code actually does. This book is not a classroom book, but is designed for real-world programmers to get results fast, real fast. I only wish I had had this book when I started programming in MFC, I expect it could have saved me months of frustration. All in all, an excellent book, but I hope that the 670-or-so pages will increase in the near future, perhaps divided into different volumes, I want more...

The "MFC Answer Book" is an excellent book that explainshow to implement advanced features that you find in many Windowsapplications. The author does not just give you code to implement the features, but clearly explains why and how the code works. Most importantly, he explains many important concepts of the MFC application framework. For example, he gives an excellent explanation of the Document/View architecture. Within this discussion, he explains how to code a variety of different user-interfaces that take advantage of the Document/View architecture. There is also a section that explains how to use frames within your application in detail. When explaining an advanced concept, the author shows how it relates to the MFC architecture by highlighting and explaining important code fragments from the MFC implementation.

This book doesn't waste much time explaining how to use tools like the ClassWizard or Application Wizard. These are topics covered in less advanced books. This book concentrates on what is important, and helps you understand the code that these tools generate. After becoming very proficient in programming Windows using Visual Basic, I wanted to learn Windows programming using C++ and MFC since it is a more expressive language. I have read about 5 books on MFC programming from cover to cover. Out of the books I have read, I have found this to be one of the best. If you are new at Windows programming using C++ and MFC, I would suggest reading a more basic book first. A less advanced book will teach you the topics you need to understand some of more advanced topics discussed in this book. Out of all the books I have read, I have found this book to be the best organized. Each topic is just a couple pages long which makes for nice reading. Also, each section comes with source code examples that demonstrate the topic being discussed. I found that all the code examples worked and the book was very accurately written. In summary, this is an excellent book to purchase when you want to learn the behavior of the MFC architecture that makes your programs run. It also explains how to implement many neat features that you find in many Windows applications.

This book is not all-inclusive, you should get Jeff Prosise's "Programming Windows with MFC" if you are looking for that. Instead, Kain's book is really the answers to the most frequent, irritating, and time-wasting little problems one finds while programming in MFC. This book should not really be necessary, except that MFC is so badly designed that little things that should be easy to do often end being a great waste of time, while the programmers search for the clumsy and roundabout way out. Should be in every MFC programmer's bookshelf.

Someone who wrote a review on this book said he likes to know the stats of the people writing reviews, so here: Ag 29, Computer Science Major, graduating shortly, I write a lot of code for school, work, and play. I eat, drink, and sleep code, in all languages.

First off, this book should be retitled to: "MFC Document/View Answer Book", because what it really covers: documents, views, and a lot of good GUI tricks and tips.

That's not a complaint necessarily- for the project I initially bought this for, I only wanted something that handled document/view architecture and GUI tricks, so this book delivered. It's a great MFC resource and the structure (like an FAQ) is refreshing and easy to follow.

I can't give it 5 stars though just because I've got a couple problems with some of the code examples, which seem inaccurate or leave small hidden details out (which you then have to deduce from the code on the CD or figure out yourself). Nothing irks me more than omitted details that, in the end, are very important to what you're trying to convey. I'm not stupid- I can figure it out eventually, but I buy books just so I don't *have* to spend hours researching "how" to do something, or "why" I have to perform some bit of trickery to get the code to compile properly.

And I was dissapointed by the lack of abstract information about how to do certain things. A lot of the book is tailored toward specific types of implementations and it's up to you to deduce how to alter things to fit your application. Without some basic, general, foundation knowledge of certain things, it can be difficult to take the concepts in this book and extend them, or alter them to fit your application's specific needs. I guess the author just felt like this book was a starting point, and you could get the rest of the information from other sources (MSDN, etc).

It's still a great book though, and if you need to do MFC programming then I'd certainly get this book. So far it's the best MFC book in my library and some of the information is stuff that you're not going to find anywhere else without some considerable searching effort.

I bought this around 1999, long after I started programming in MFC. The one regret I had was not buying this book sooner. Just the format alone of this book is priceless. The question-answer format makes it very easy to find things and makes a great quick reference with good examples. I am writing this review almost 6 years later because this book still helped me out a lot even after years of writing MFC stuff. The great thing about the book is it covers a lot of MFC material and hits on things you may not use day to day.

If you are a beginning MFC programmer or even intermediate, this is the book for you.

This book is a collection of 'recipes'. I had to implement something and the 'recipe' described very clearly how to do it. It saved me a lot of time. If you see something that applies to your problems, get the book and get it done in 1/2 hour instead of 1 or 2 days. Just a catch, implement the idea and not the exact source code (it is copyrighted)