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Windows Wisdom for C and C++ Programmers by Leendert Ammeraal

ISBN: 0-471-94004-6       Publisher: Wiley       Pages: 245 pp + disk       Price: £24.95

Categories:   MS Windows     microsoft     borland

Reviewed by Peter Wippell in C Vu 6-1 (Nov 1993)

I found three features particularly helpful: the chapters are easy to refer back to because they each follow an identical plan, the definition of each problem is clearly separated from its solution, and the questions at the ends of the chapters are well chosen. The latter will catch you out if you haven't absorbed the important points, and I was pleased to find a full answer to each question at the end of the book. In each chapter the solution program, also on the companion disk, is given in C, in Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) and in Borland Object Windows (OWL). The examples compiled and ran satisfactorily under C and OWL, after an initial hitch caused because some make files assume that the default TURBOC.CFG file exists. I wasn't equipped to test the MFC versions.

The explanatory text and programming style is clear and instructive in the body of the book, where the programs are short. However the Towers of Hanoi is much longer and, for me, tricky and hard to follow. Here, I would like to see a clearer implementation, using classes representing the objects in the problem statement.

The author draws attention to the size of the enormous executable files, which you get when libraries are used, although an explanation is outside the scope of the book. He gives the following figures for one program: BCC- 10240, MFC-24576, OWL-61440. Doesn't this violate that much vaunted principle of C++ : What you don't use, you don' t pay for? There seems to be a conspiracy of silence on this subject in the compiler documentation. Don't we badly need a tool for stripping out useless code?

I can recommend this book to a C programmer wanting an elementary introduction to Windows programming. Alternatively, it makes entertaining and profitable refresher, for someone coming back to Windows after a gap.