Customer Reviews

Making Unix and Windows NT Talk with CDROM

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This book is for programmers. It contains a ton of C++ code that I used to drop right into my program. To say that it is strictly for Unix to NT migration sells it way short. It contains building blocks for both OS's -- classes that wrap semapores, threads, processes, etc -- that from the outside look the same for both platforms. It then goes into how to use these building blocks in programs that communicate to programs running on other Unix or NT machines on the network.

I bought both books by these authors, but wouldn't recommend them both. Get this book if you aren't familiar with system programming, otherwise get the other book. They are good at going into the detail of the different concepts, their code samples are their class definitions, which seem to just be wrapper classes.

Maybe it is my programming style, IMHO, if you really want to write a portable, non-GUI application on Unix and Windows/NT, get "POSIX Programmer's Guide" by Donald Lewine and a POSIX envrionment (I use Mingw32[POSIX], Tk[GUI] & GNU C/C++ on Windows/XP). "Using C on the UNIX System" is also a useful text because it has very small, complete code samples. The POSIX environment will give you a platform independant layer that doesn't require C++.

When I first picked up this book I was skeptical that a topic such as this could be covered thoroughly enough to be useful. I was pleasantly surprised. Not only did I find the chapter text easy to read and to the point, but I found the source code easy to understand as well. I also found the source code sufficiently complete to use it as a basis for my own work. I hope there is going to be a second edition.