|
|
Webmaster Book Store > Webmaster books beginning with W
|
Windows System Programming (3rd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Microsoft Technology Series) |
Author: Johnson M. Hart
Published: 2004-11-05 |
List price: $69.99
Our price: $55.99
|
Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: January 06th, 2009 04:56:15 AM
|
|
|
Customer comments on this selection.
 Windows System Programming
Windows System Programming is a great resource for programming using the core Windows API. It is the only resource I found that gives practical and complete examples on real-world programming tasks, such as Named Pipes using IO Completion ports. It will be a permanent fixture on my work desk, as it should be on any C++ Window's developers desk.
 Good but could be better
What impressed me most about this book was the subject range. It doesn't cover GUI stuff, but does cover UNICODE, threading, file handling, sockets, writing services, structured exception handling etc, and is pretty much up to date at time of writing this review (it doesn't cover Vista but does touch on 64-bit issues). There are books that cover some of these subjects more deeply, but I cannot think of a book that currently attempts to cover all of these subjects to the level that this book does or with such a consistent usage of Windows techniques.
Although this book does cover bits of the C run-time library, it concentrates more on what the Windows API can do for you that the C run-time cannot. This particularly showed through in the section on file handling. For someone like me who started working with the C and the C run-time library 20+ years ago, has worked with Windows APIs since the very first version of MS Windows appeared, worked with C++ for more than 10 years and worked on numerous UNIX projects too (often with code portable between Windows and UNIX), this book provides numerous reminders of why I should consider Windows APIs instead of C run-time libraries on projects where I don't need my code to be portable to UNIX. That's the key thing though - for an experienced developer this book largely acts as a reminder or as a trigger to go investigate certain things further, for rarely did it feel like an authoritative guide to the topics included. It is good, but not authoritative enough to be worthy of 5 stars. For example, my speciality is high-performance, multi-threaded servers handling protocols such as TCP/IP. Although this book covers multi-threading fairly well (although not brilliantly), I was particularly disappointed by the Sockets coverage - I could be wrong but I got the impression that the author prefers other interfaces to the Sockets API. Similarly, structured exception handling was covered very well, and file handling and memory handling pretty well, but the section on services felt a bit lightweight.
Example code in the book appears to be pretty good, although I have spotted a few minor issues. I haven't checked the errata on the author's web-site, but would hope that corrections do appear there.
So to conclude - yes, I think any serious Windows developer (particularly if writing server apps) should have a copy of this alongside books such as Jeffrey Richter's Programming Applications for Microsoft Windows, but having said that, I suspect that most people will think of Jeffrey Richter as the more authoritative even if in need of an update (which is planned to be happening later this year under a new title).
Excellant Windows system level programming
I'm an old system's programmer, and I loved this book. It provides the exact information you need if your an experienced system's coder, and just need the specifics of how to accomplish the operations on windows. Multithreading, memory mapped file i/o, process & thread management, networking, you name it, and it's in here.
I use this text hand and glove with "Windows Internals" by Russinovich. Winternals explains what needs to be done, and Hart's book describes how. This is really an excellant text.
I particularly liked Appendix "C". Sprinkled throughout the text are example programs. Then Appendix "C" compares the real world performance of running the programs. The author does an excellant job of explaining why one approach is suprior to the other, than backs it up with timing examples (on difference versions of windows, using different hardware, and even the differences between FAT & NTFS).
About the only imrpovement to the text I could suggest, is less reference to Unix/POSIX. Most systems programmers are familiar with Unix, and it helps to have previous understanding from another platform, but I think people who buy this text are looking to learn the "Windows Way". Also, the text would benefit from a deeper treatment of the Windows Security model. As it stands, a demonstration of Unix-Style permissions for NTFS is not terribly useful in the real world.
Fantastic book with excellent coverage of multithreaded programming
The best thing about this book, in my opinion, is numerous comparisons that Mr. Hart makes between UNIX and Windows. As a recent Computer Science graduate, all of my system programming experience was in a UNIX environment. (My university used that OS for programming assignment exclusively.) After graduating, however, I found myself in a job that uses Windows. From school, I was familiar with the things I needed to do - parallel programming, sockets, services, but I had no idea how to actually implement such things in Windows. Mr. Hart's direct comparisons to UNIX gave me a frame of reference that made it easier for me to learn the subject matter quicker.
Also, the book's four chapters on multithreaded programming have been extremely insightful and indispensable. Mr. Hart writes "when defects do occur [in a multithreaded application], as they will, code inspection ... often is the most effective in finding and fixing the defects' root causes" (pg. 309). If you don't have the necessary knowledge, staring at the code all day won't do you a bit of good. Mr. Hart's fantastic coverage of this subject has helped me understand the fundamentals of this difficult programming paradigm.
In addition, the information on Structured Exception Handling (SEH) and Unicode was very helpful and informative.
Lastly, I found this book to be very useful because it is very up-to-date.
I would highly recommend this book.
 Touches on in depth issues of win32 programming
Nice book that touches on in depth issues of win32 programming such as file handling, registry, memory issues, etc.
|
Similar Listings
|
|
Our Webmaster book picks:
|
|
Search the Webmaster Products Store
LCS Amazon Store 2.5 © 2009
|
|
|
