Customer Reviews

Win32 System Programming: A Windows® 2000 Application Developer's Guide (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is roughly the same as Steven's "Advanced Programing in the Unix Environment". It gets you in touch with the moving pieces of the Windows operating system.

Bring with you a strong understanding of C/C++ and some experience administrating a Windows system and you can be up and running banging against the operating system's APIs. Open network sockets, play with "Thread Local Storage", create and register your very own service, interface with the security system, whack around the registry, and a dozen other ways to shoot yourself in the foot or get some actual work done.

This book has almost nothing about making windows, graphics, sounds, or anything else that will help you get started making yet another accounting application. If that's what you are looking for look somewhere else.

This book also comes threateningly close to being a good beginners guide to porting *nix applications to the Windows operating system. The author draws many parallels to various *nix utilities and how to write their equivalent using Windows' APIs.

For those that like plenty of rope to hang themselves, this is the book for you. I enjoyed learning about the various facilities Windows provides the developer, and feel that this book helped me gain a better understanding of where to look first for doing fairly common relatively low-level tasks.

John Hart has done a fabulous job of expanding and updating his coverage of Win32 system programming. Unique in it's perspective of educating programmers familiar with UNIX or a similar OS, this book explains the landscape of Win32 operating systems, how they relate to each other and what features are present or missing from each of them.

With almost 150 pages of new material, John digs way beneath the surface and covers new topics such as advanced thread synchronization, sockets, Windows 2000, Win64, and performance comparisons of multiple ways to solve a problem. Many existing topics are also updated and have new sample programs.

The appendix cross reference of Win32, UNIX, and C runtime library APIs that was in the first edition has also been revisitied and expanded. A very valuable resource for anyone new to either OS or working with both.

In short, if you are coming to Win32 from a UNIX background this is definitely the book for you. If you're already a crack Win32 programmer, you'll probably learn a lot as well.

The rating I give here is just based on a skim of the book. However, after visiting the author's website, I very quickly realized that there is a fourth edition of the text. Unless you specifically want a more historical perspective, I would recommend that you get the fourth edition.

This book pretty much covers everything I needed to know about Win32 system programming. It has very good coverage of topics like threading, file handling, Memory Management, Interprocess communication, network programming, and asynchronous I/O with completion ports. Ever wonder how to share memory or access really, really huge files? Want to learn how to build more scalable servers? This book covers all that and more. I recently took a new job that uses all of this stuff and I was relieved to find a book that covered it all so well.

He gives a very good generalized view of the windows programming philosophy and explains some common windows types and their uses, which helps in understanding the rest of the API. There are plenty of programming examples and he often compares Win32 programming techniques to UNIX programming techniques giving references to the Stevens book which will help put things in context for UNIX programmers.

For client side programming you can get by with Petzold but for server side this book is a must. If you do system development on Win32 then this book is your weapon.

This book, together with the reference documentation, should get any programmer started with Win32 system programming. There are plenty of comparisons with Unix and this can be very useful for anyone with that background. It is up to date and covers Windows 2000 and give you hints how to prepare for Win64. Especially it covers asynchronous I/O and threads in a good way. The last chapter gives an overview of RPC and COM, but anyone really interested in this probably needs another book.

This book is extremely easy to read. It is a great reference for experienced UNIX system programmers who want to quickly implement the same functionality on Win 32. I guess it will also be a useful book for novice systems programmers since it has good coverage of the basics as well.

For those who have missed the first edition, this book treats extensively the Win32 API from a system developer point of view (no GUI at all).

Its main difference with other books is the close description of the C runtime library and UNIX features that match each Win32 topic (ls, touch or grep on Windows, console in/out redirection, _beginthreadex,...)

Each chapter has an "Additional Reading" section that guides you to books from other authors (Richter, Solomon,...) and even other editors. The author's web site (http://world.std.com/~jmhart/top2ed.htm) already provides some comments about this second edition.

This second edition covers Windows 2000 in addition to new chapters dedicated to sockets, services and Win64 issues. In my opinion, the three chapters about threading and advanced synchronization issues are simply a must read.

This book provides a thorough treatment of system programming principles for Microsoft Operating Systems. The author has a concise, to-the-point writing style and he covers the majority of relevant topics. The text also contains a number of useful and imaginative examples of the Windows programming interface. I liked the revised multithreading sections, which contain a lot of interesting new material (especially for readers with UNIX experience). Win32 System Programming is a manageable and useful reference guide.

Hi there! Are u a programmer that loves Win32 stuff and system programming? If you're........then......GET THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW! Stop looking! This is the BOOK for you! It has such a concise way of presenting information that u wanna know and need to know! From learning File I/O to Thread Syncronization, this book has everything! Not convinced?! This book even has a list of really cool exercises that'll test what u've learn so that u know where ya' weaknesses are! Still not enough?! Well.....this book EVEN has a list of book you can get extra information on, as well as a web site truly DEVOTED to the book! U can tell at 1 glance that the author(Johnson M.Hart) is really sinCere about teaching you Win32 System Programming, cos' he says in the book that if you've any queries and questions about the book and the web site can't help you, you can m@il him!(he provides his e-m@il address in his book) So, as you can see........this book is more than a Bargain! The code is simple and straightforward, and he gives lessons on Win32 concepts and theories before showing the code so that u understand what u're applying, and instead of other books like Jeffery Richter's Advanced Window(3rd and 4th Edition) which uses GUI applications to present the program interface, Mr.Hart's book uses console-based programs so that u don't have to know the Win32 GUI programming functions and stuff, and focuses more on the matter at hand! The CD-ROM has all the code and is documented with thorough code explanations! CooL?! And it's cheap too! So pal.......GET IT NOW! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

This book pretty much covers everything I needed to know about Win32 system programming. It has very good coverage of topics like threading, file handling, Memory Management, Interprocess communication, network programming, and asynchronous I/O with completion ports. Ever wonder how to share memory or access really, really huge files? Want to learn how to build more scalable servers? This book covers all that and more. I recently took a new job that uses all of this stuff and I was relieved to find a book that covered it all so well.

He gives a very good generalized view of the windows programming philosophy and explains some common windows types and their uses, which helps in understanding the rest of the API. There are plenty of programming examples and he often compares Win32 programming techniques to UNIX programming techniques giving references to the Stevens book which will help put things in context for UNIX programmers.

For client side programming you can get by with Petzold but for server side this book is a must. If you do system development on Win32 then this book is your weapon.