[Home Page] - [Reviews Main]

Application Programming for Windows NT by William H Murray & Chris H Pappas

ISBN: 0-07-881933-4       Publisher: McGraw-Hill       Pages: (Osborne) 680pp       Price: £28.95

Categories:   MS Windows

Reviewed by Philip Kerrigan in C Vu 6-2 (Jan 1994)

Nonetheless the Windows interface itself is no small thing and this book covers it quite thoroughly. After a very enthusiastic introduction to the nuts and bolts of NT and the concepts behind it the authors start showing how to make programs, covering scrollbars, adding icons and cursors, menus, dialogue boxes and fonts. Graphics and charting are developed in a separate series of chapters and a fourth section of the book covers using the Microsoft Foundation Class Library. A final chapter explains Unicode.

It's nice to see books coming with discs included, but unfortunately I wasn't able to make use of it as in Italy the final Release of NT has only just been distributed, with the trial version of C++ already expired, so I can't comment on the code compilation. However I felt that since the code was already on disc more than was necessary was also printed in the book. Certainly I don't think it was necessary to reproduce all the make files and definition files.

The 21 pages of index are not as much as they seem, due to the large typeface, but more than adequate and I could find what I was searching for. There is unfortunately no bibliography although another book on C++ programming by the same authors is mentioned a couple of times. The book is nicely laid out and easily read, if a little wordy.

The book is indicated as being for all skill levels and it is true that you need to have some experience to understand event driven programming and what is going on in Windows. However, I don't think you can then say it can be used by beginners simply because it is explained in excruciating detail what a make file is (which appears to be a new discovery for the authors) and why headers are a good idea. A lot of functions are not really covered well enough and there are several extremely long tables of function parameter values that leave no clear idea of how they are organised.

All in all there is still little choice in books on Windows NT. Although this book could do with improving, it does cover the WNT Graphical interface in a lot of detail and I will therefore recommend it.

Pappas
Borland C++ Handbook (Second Edition) by W. Murray & C Pappas  (Reviewed Jul 1992)
Borland C++ Handbook by William H. Murray & Chris H. Pappas  (Reviewed Nov 1991)
C/C++ Programmer's Guide by William Murray & Chris Pappas  (Reviewed Nov 1996)
Complete Reference Visual C++ 5, The by William Murray & Chris Pappas [Recommended]  (Reviewed Sep 1998)
Microsoft C/C++, the Complete Reference by Murray & Pappas  (Reviewed Sep 1993)
Turbo C++ Professional Handbook by William H Murray & Chris Pappas  (Reviewed Mar 1991)
Visual C++ Handbook, The by Murray & Pappas  (Reviewed Jul 1995)
Visual C++ Templates by William Murray & Chris Pappas  (Reviewed Sep 2000)