The author lacks an audience

I gambled on this book because the table of contents described the topics that I wanted to learn about.

However, reading the book has been fairly unsatisfactory. The author doesnt seem to know whether his reader is a beginning C++ programmer who unfamiliar with Windows programming, or whether his reader is an experienced developer, well-exposed to MFC and Visual C++. His content wanders from an almost insulting "Windows 2000 for Dummies" to snippets of MFC code that are near useless without installing and reviewing the full code that come on the CD, and probably incomprehensible to a novice.

I was especially confused with why he spent an entire chapter on Petzold-style (C-style) Windows programming and Hungarian notation when virtually all his example code is MFC (C++) code (and an alternate naming convention).

I have been sorely disappointed by the lack of meat to much of the topic matter. I do not feel that I am getting a good understanding of how Windows 2000 works under the hood. I could have as easily derived as much information from a non-programming book, and used Inside Visual C++ (Kruglinski) for the MFC.

All said, the author can write intelligble prose. Small portions have been interesting. I suspect that he did not decide on an audience before writing the book. "Try to please everyone and you will please no one."

Other Reviews

• The author lacks an audience
• Decent for someone familiar with win programming