Great! But be careful.

The C++ code after Chapter 1 in this book will not work unless you have the latest Platform SDK installed. So don't buy this book unless you meet the OS requirements for the latest Platform SDK. As of February 2003 the Platform SDK requires Windows XP, Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 SP6, or Windows Server 2003. The SDK is NOT supported on Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows Millennium Edition.

I don't have any of the required OS's so running the code in this book is impossible for me. I'm not going to unfairly judge the book because of this, however. I suppose if you're a serious developer you should probably be developing on one of the required platforms anyway. I have learned a lot from this book and I could get some of the code to work with MAJOR tweaking. It's true that a lot of this book is just stuff that you could find all over the MSDN Library, but it is very nice to have it all in one book. It starts from the basics and slowly leads into more advanced topics which would be difficult to do if you're only using the MSDN Library.

I don't regret buying the book, and in a strange way, since I had to do so much intense research on the Winsock functions and syntax to tweak the code enough to get it to work, maybe I learned a little more than I would have if the code had just "worked out of the box". I don't recommend learning this way though, it's very frustrating. I think it's a great book if you can get the code to run, if not, then stay away.

Other Reviews

• Not too bad, but there is better out there
• Bad source code
• Scatter-gather approach
• Two Stars. Not a Fraction More.
• Great! But be careful.