Customer Reviews

Visual Basic Developer's Guide to the Win32 API

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

 

 

This is by far the most useful book on the Win32 API I have encountered -- and the other developers in my department liked it so much, they immediately ordered copies for themselves.

This book will be an invaluable quick reference for the novice and professional alike. It is written in a simple, concise style and contains many undocumented API functions which the reader will find immediately useful.

However, it's not just a quick reference -- it provides a solid foundation for understanding how the API works and how to convert C data types to VB types.

If I were stranded on a desert island and had to choose just one API book, this would be it.

Despite the several negative reviews, I bought this book, hoping that the one five-star review might actually be right. However, after carefully reading through 6 chapters and browsing through the entire book, I had to agree with the negative reviews. There were no code examples on the website before Chapter 5 (the author claimed to have). The sample code for Chapter 9 Shell APIs - Launching Applications was a mess. It simply didn't realize most of the functions it claimed to be able to realize, and it had many errors (e.g., missing class modules). It seemed like the three examples in Chapter 9 were badly bundled together.

There are a lot of unnecessary underscores (_ for continuation of code) in the code examples - seems to be an effort to make the book longer and sell for more money.

In conclusion, this book is just an MSDN dump. And the used book price of around $3 to $4 accurately reflects it value.

This book is great for providing references inside the Windows API. I use it to get information for my programs frequently

This book did nothing for me I couldn't look in MSDN Lib. for. Lacks proper explaination and covers few advanced API calls.

This book is limited to basic API functions. Much of it looks like a dump of the MSDN literature, slighty edited. There is a brief discussion of general issues regarding API calls from Visual Basic.

Within a limited scope, this book does a decent job of covering simple API functions. A lot of it looks like a dump of the MSDN documentation, slightly cleaned up. There is some introductory discussion of general issues regarding API calling from VB.