Customer Reviews

Visual C++ .NET Bible

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've been working through this book for a while now, and overall the material is presented in a decent format. For the most part you can pick the topic to work on (ie. Menus, Dialog boxes, etc) and focus on that chapter to learn it. For someone like myself who needs a point solution (very specific app with very narrow GUI requirements) this works well.

However that said, one thing that is driving me nuts in this book are the bug-ridden examples. I've been through quite a few chapters now, and I've come to the expectation that its not a question of -if- a given example has a bug, but where it is located (since it almost certainly has one or more).

To give an example I just read over the Modeless dialog example in chapter 11. It starts off having you throw down a dialog and a bunch of controls, without exactly telling you what IDs to give them (after a while you get used to this, because the author does this a lot). Its important because by the time you get to step 7 in the example you realize that the ellipsis button should have an ID of IDC_FILEOPEN if you want your function call to line up with the demo (again not such a problem since you can change the IDs at anytime - but I'm just getting started). At step 10 you get to enter in a global function (huh? what the heck happened to the class?). Moving on - Step 12 has you adding in member variables to a class which won't exist until step 13. Yeah good job there. Step 19 has an erroneous structure definition. And to top it off, steps 21 and 23 have you add message handler functions without actually telling you how to map them in the message map. Whew! and this is just one example program. Typed in exactly as the steps in the book describe, this example compiled with something like 20+ errors. Fixing the structure and the map problems (which required downloading the code off the website to figure out what to do), eventually got it to work.

Overall I think the content and the way the material is broken up is good, however this book needs a complete overhaul and proofing on the examples.

This is a regurgetation of C++ and MFC. .NET and managed C++ are only briefly addressed. There are better books.

Several months ago, I was faced with a daunting challenge -- to develop a state of the art, user-friendly Windows application despite the fact that I had never written any Windows code. Armed with this book and a knoweldge of C++, I quickly mastered enough MFC, COM, and ATL to deliver a great product to a happy client. I couldn't have done it without this book. It will quickly give you the foundation to learn more advanced topics or move in whatever direction your work requires. If you supplement this book with the examples and www.codeproject.com or www.codeguru.com, you will be up to speed in no time.

I bought this book expecting the best as Tom Archer is an original CodeGuru founder and I was definitely not disappointed. As another reviewer noted the ATL and COM chapters are worth the price of the book by themselves. Add to that, Archer's unparralled database chapters and some great content on DLLs, custom drawn controls, dialogs, document/view, etc. etc. and you hdefinitely have a great book.

Enriched information on the MFC, ATL framework, plus some extra knowledge on .Net, ATL Server, COM+ etc. It can be treated as the extra references on the development of the above technologies stated. Look for others if no experience before.

I got this book as our development team was moving from Visual C++ 6 to Visual C++ .NET and I wanted to get a little ahead of the game. I had read and heard that VC++.NET was significantly different to VC6 so I decided to go for the Bible from Visual C++ .NET Bible as I've always like the bible series from Wiley.

I was definitely not disappointed.

The book covered all aspects of Windows C++ development from menus in MFC to creating dll's. The main area I was interested in was ATL and I'm glad I got this book before I switched to VS.NET. ATL development has changed significantly in VS.NET as attributes have been introduced. VC.NET Bible give an excellent overview of ATL in VS.NET.

I haven't read this book in its entirety, but it's one book that i'll definitely have near my machine in work. Topics are easy to find, and all chapters explain how to do something and why you should do it in a certain way.

Well worth the price.

This book is exactly as advertised - a great MFC book. I'm dumbfounded at some of the other reviewers who couldn't read the very first sentence of the "Who Is This Book For" page that clearly states that this book is an MFC book and *NOT* a .NET book. But that's they're problem. The bottom line is that I own about 10 MFC books - everything from Kruglinski to Prosise to Archer and this book is by far the best. You will absolutely not find better material on integrating COM/ATL with MFC or database chapters and he's the only VC++ author I know of who actually activately supports the book on his site. Well done, Mr. Archer!!

This is not for a beginner as stated in the forward. I was hesitant to buy a "Bible" book, but this one is great, covering all the important aspects of programming C++ on a Windows platform. My favorite thing is the coverage of C++, including Win32, MFC, ATL, WTL, .NET (MC++). If your looking to write more than "Hello World!", then grab this excellent book and let the well renowned author, Tom Archer, take you for an adventure.
I read Tom's other book "Inside C#" and it was excellent as well.
His books are to the point without fluff.

As another reviewer pointed out, it has a lot of errors in the code. If you just follow the instructions you would most probably not get your code compiling.

Author omitted many things that you need to know. He states, for example, "create SDI project" in step 1. In step 10 or so you find out that you had to give it a specific name which he failed to indicate in the beginning. Same with IDs and so on. Author also fails to give the code for the header files and you just need to think what each variable does (and still write the header file code, of course) or download the solution from the web.

Also, author asks to call the function with one name, and in the code he changes the name to a different one. Adds confusion.

This book has helped me learn the Basics of Visual C++ .net without the slowness of a beginner book. It's a pretty complicated language but this book explains ideas concepts fairly well, although sometimes, it does get a bit confusing. The sample projects are pratical and usefull in real life projects. Overall it's a pretty good book