Customer Reviews

Professional MFC with Vc++5 Programming with CDROM

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

If this book is the best there is, it is only for lack of good competition. Blaszczak has great knowledge of how windows and MFC work inside and out, but his programming and teaching styles are less than masterful. This book is best used as a reference, but I rarely even consult it as such as the online help is more informative and the book contains few novel ideas. As an overview of MFC the book fail miserably, failing to present good techniques for incorporating MFC into a project. A good example of this lack of insight is in his presentation of tree controls. He discusses the API in detail (though less than the help) but fails to present a useful paradigm for maintaining a tree control along side data in a program. A would be example along these lines (though not an elegant one) is cut short and followed with a paragraph about how recursion is tricky and confusing. A less critical problem with this book is all of the blather about hokey and other irrelevant things. At times the book seems aimed at highschool programming students who would drift off if not for his down-to-earth asides. This despite the word professional in bold on the cover...

This book is one of the most helpful and informative books on MFC there is, no you don't have to be a expert to read it but you do need some good foundation knowledge of MFC to understand it. as for the dips that give it 1 star, if you notice they complain about the most basic elements such as working with check boxes, placing checks in checkboxes, sorry people but that's beginning MFC not PROFESSIONAL

Thanks Mike! I spend over $1000 every year on new books too. This book frustrated me at first when I knew nothing about MFC and little more than Petzold's well written text. But after scouring other MFC books and learning the DevStudio, this book proved invaluable. It is not a book for beginners, but every experienced C++ programmer developing in Windows must have this book. Mike's style is relaxed, accurate, thorough yet entertaining. His coverage of the Multi Doc-View architecture is great! I also loved the discussion on customizing menus and controls on the fly. This book paid for itself many of thousands of times over. Caution: if you own any book with "for Dummies" in the title, this book is not for you.

First of all, Mike Blaszczak is, as I understand it, the lead programmer for the MFC development team. I think the best thing about this book is that it offers insights into WHY MFC works the way it does. He explains why you want to implement things one way instead of another, and gives good reasons, based on the framework's architecture as to why.

As for completeness: It's 1061 pages long. It covers just about everything in MFC that you could be interested in. And what it covers, it covers in adequate or more than adequate detail.

The book's organization is the best I've seen of any MFC book. I know exactly where to go to find the information I'm interested in.

This book works well as both a reference, and reading from front to back. Personally, I've jumped around from chapter to chapter, but have read almost the entire book at this point.

In a phrase: "The best programming book I have EVER read." I've got about 500 of them to compare with.

After starting MFC with "Visual C++ 5 in 21 days", this was the most appropriate step to go deep, deep into MFC. If you need to use something with MFC, just name it... I would suggest the writer to present his book more like a reference manual.

Although this would be an excellent book for a beginner ready for more meat, this book will not take an intermediate programmer to the next level. How it attained the "Professional" title is beyond me. Mike's writing is clear and concise, however, there are places where he tends to jump around. Some of the sample programs are not clearly defined witin the book. I applaud Mike for a good effort, but this is not for the good intermediate wanting to progress to the advanced level. A single book on MFC at the advanced level is probably never going to be available. More like a 3 volume library!

Yes a lot of digression. It just give you a starting point, rest is the information excess. You can find all these stuff in online help or in MFC reference. Believe me the online reference is much more readable. Also the visual impact of the pages are not well designed, no visual explanations (just screen shoots), no good diagrams, no remainders on the pages. It is formatted like source codes or abstract math books. In order to understand MFC command routing I should look at the online Help of VC++ 5.0 and draw my own diagrams spending 30 minutes. Namely, I had a start point but I should read the subject in somewhere else. This book doesnt give you a map on your road. A lot of details fill the pages, but as I wrote you can find all of these much more detailed and without digression in the online documentation of MFC. Buy another book!

This is an okay programming book. Yes, it could have lost the rambling jokes and incessant intrusions of Blasczak's obsession with hockey. But, after trying for several weeks to understand MFC and failing (and I'm no bozo when it comes to grokking wonky software), I found this book and it finally explained my problem: I was thinking logically, and MFC is not entirely logically designed. I can now use MFC, make it do what I expect it can do, and hack around it to do what it can't. Still, a little less of the vanity-press attitude would have improved the experience. The core chapter, on the application architecture, should be junked and rewritten from scratch. It is informative, and would make for a good long Usenet posting, but it wanders and devalues an expensive and barely portable book. The stars are because it's informative, which the VC++ documentation is not.

Finally, a book that explains what is REALLY going on behind the scenes in MFC! Most of the books I have read on Visual C++ are just fancy tutorials (now add this line here, now do this, etc). Blaszczak takes the time to explain the "why's" of MFC, not just the how's. Don't buy this if you are new to Windows Programming. I would recommend reading Petzold's book first and making sure that you have a good understanding of C++. Definitely not for beginners.

I've been an MFC prgrammer for over 3 years now, and until a couple of months ago I'd been consistently disappointed with all the MFC books I had seen (except perhaps"Inside VC++, D.J. Kruglinski" to some extent). But then I happened to lay my hands on this book by Mike Blaszczak and I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. The book is pretty big, but quite readable and the guy really knows what he is talking about. The chapters on Windows Common Controls, Doc/View and Multi-Threading are themselves worth the money. The coverage of ActiveX controls is adequate. If there is anything lacking, I would have loved to see some guidelines and samples on developing pure COM servers, as opposed to ActiveX controls, using MFC classes. (But unfortunately even the MSDN CDs do not seem to have any good articles or samples on that. Can Mike, or anyone else, point me in the right direction?) On the whole its a great book, and is worth buying for any serious MFC programmer.