Customer Reviews

Windows 95 Programming for Dummies

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Starts off well explaining API programming then goes into MFC and does a Titanic!

Get some of Schildt's programming books instead

I have to agree with previous comments that this book presents a lot which must be taken on faith- in particular, the inner workings of the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC). Someone moving from here definately should probably move to a good MFC reference.

Second, the material presented focuses exclusively on writing applications and almost exclusively on text-based applications. The first example program does touch on vector graphics, but there is nothing about bitmaps, audio, etc. Similarly, there is nothing about building DLLs, OLE, etc.

Third, the book was clearly written to Visual C++ 2.0 which is now several years old. In my own case, I was using VC++ 4.0 and had to figure out how to access some features which had moved and files which had new naming conventions.

On the whole, though, I got out of it what I wanted... a functional literacy of Win32 application development.

having typed in the code of the very first programm, i had to discover that the programm doesn't work! Zeros (0) are printed as O's (O)... and that makes a huge diffrence; i picked that up, but there seems to be other things wrong, as my compiler ain't compiling.... beginners stuff - NOT!

I type in the prog1_1 and it would not link, using Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0. From then on the rest of the book got very confusing. I got discourage and gave up on it! But at least I got "Hello World" to linked, compiled, and executed in DOS and Linux, using something called gcc. I can see why dos and unix programming in C can be easier than Windows programming. Oh well!

The title tends to be a little misleading, the book starts you out with a huge peice of code, and then explains how its work in one long chapter, which leaves you confused, and it doesnt present the underlying stucture of the MFC classes, the author expects you to operate on faith, a moderate book but much better are out there