Customer Reviews

MFC Internals: Inside the Microsoft(c) Foundation Class Architecture

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a really cool book for programmers who have had some experience with MFC. The book gives a very thorough explanation of the class library architecture. It explains in depth what all the macros expand into and how everything works. Topics discussed in detail are : 1. Message mapping architecture. 2. Runtime Time Type Information. (How it is implemented in MFC) 3. Doc / View architecture. (This section alone is worth the price of the book. The printing and the print preview section really takes the price.) 4. Serialization. (Yes this book manages to explain how the whole thing works under the wraps.) 5. COM/OLE (This section not only shows how COM/OLE is implemented inside MFC, it makes for independent reading by itself for COM/OLE concepts.) The only shortcoming I have found is that the books does not touch any of the database classes or ODBC stuff. All in all a very good buy.

I bought this book because an reviewer mentioned it has a nice coverage of COM/OLE. After reading these chapters (11 to 15), I think this book explained the topic extremely well. Only these chapters are worth the money many times. I has many books, such as Inside OLE, Inside COM, Inside DCOM, Professional MFC with VC5, essential COM, Programming Windows with MFC. But this book explained OLE in a better way. After I read this book, I can quickly understand related topics in other books.

Not suitable for MFC begginers, but very good and informative book for professionals. It is writen in very good manner - it is easy to read and understand even complex topics
MFC Internals are described in attractive way, so is not boring to read a book.
So, I like a way the books is writen and I like its content.

The under-the-hood treatment of MFC is very useful, especially the chapters on OLE with MFC. Warning this book is not for beginners. You must know C++ cold and have at least a working knowlege of the windows API to get the most out of it

Are you still amazed what's going on behind the scenes? If yes, buy this! It's a great book to enjoy exploration of MFC. Navigate with it and then try yourself. You'll probably find America... I would say, authors have taken a great pain to construct such a good material.

Every MFC VC++ programmer should have it. I explains the workings of windows very well. However, the book is too compact and should become a set of books. I wish that they would have covered more topics like TCP/IP and Sockets, and given some direction on how to make some of these things in the book practicle. All in all it is a good book.

This book is a must for anyone who is trying to understand the deeper issues of Windows95/NT programming. The only problem I found with the book was that it tried to compact to much information in one book. The book should actually be a set. I wish they would have covered a few more topics like TCP/IP and Sockets. After chapter 10, its all DLL's and COM stuff which I only skimmed, but I still thought it was good. Buy it you will like it and it is not for the novice.

There's a real need for good books on this subject but I see two major areas for improvement

1)The scope is too large. The entire 700 pages could be devoted to a one subject, such as the inner workings of Embedding/Linking.

2)Looks like it was written based on a collection of notes from running the debugger. Frankly, if this is what I'm going to get I'd rather use the debugger than a long list of this calls that, that call that ....... This goes on for pages; how about some freak'n diagrams guys???

Anyway, the book did help, and I got my money's worth, but think they should make another pass at it.

Randall Edick

I used this book as my primary study material for the Using Visual C++ w/ MFC MCSD exam and passed on the first try (800+).

This book does a great job of describing how MFC works and what the sections are trying to accomplish.

This book is not another MFC book and not for beginner. it tells you how it work instead of how to use it. To benefit from it, readers should have some grasp on Windows, C++ and using MFC itself!. It covers how the windows message goes a long the way up to your class, CObject, Dialog, Doc/View Architecture, Threads, COM & OLE. The appendix is very helpful for those who want to explore further into the code of MFC. I recommend this book for those who really want to know why the MFC work the way it is.