First read "Sorely Disappointed", and then add this to that excellent review:Avoid this blatant and failed attempt to do no more than fill a hole in a pubisher's lineup.
This slender, shallow and derivative work is bulked up not only with two pages of appendix for every page of text, most of which is available from Microsoft in the online documentation, but it continues to insult the intellience of the purchaser by declaring on the back cover:
"The accompanying CD-ROM contains code examples covering the material discussed in the book"
Instead, the reader gets a 7 mb grab-bag of C++/C# code, some dlls, and a few readmes. Not one single example keyed to the text.
Of course to get anyone to buy this book, they had to be able to to say, "See, we have a CD!".
Yes, and they have words on a page too. But you can do better with your money.
I knew I was in trouble when I cracked open the books and saw that the appendix started on page 139 of a 356 page book. The book only has 5 chapters all only lightly skim the surface of each topic. Chapter 1 - Introduction (Windows 2000 OS Architecture), 7 pages of cursory information found in every whitepaper and book ever written since Windows NT was release years ago.
Chapter 2 - Processes, Threads and Jobs in Windows 2000, ho hum - about 30 plus pages on how to create processes, threads and jobs (cursory information once again).
Chapter 3 - .Net Architecture, granted if you have *never* read anything on .NET then the next 45 or so pages would serve as a good primer (or go to msdn.microsoft.com for the same information for free).
Chapters 4 - Visual C++ 7.0, OK now were getting some where, {ugh!} 7 pages of product information describing the features within the different versions of VC++ 7. Page 99 - Programming with Managed Extensions for C++, maybe just maybe we'll get to the meat - no such luck. In the next 20 or so pages everything is covered from classes, boxing, arrays and exception handling, a whirlwind tour.
Chapter 5 - C#, only 11 pages were required to gloss over the best language ever to come out of Redmond, culminating with a heart stopping rendition of "Hello World".
The remainder of the book in puffed full of SDK information, Alphabetic lists of API, data types, process/thread priority constants, namespaces and compiler options. And for some odd reason way in the back of the book there are appendices on Attributes, Debugging and a 3 page tutorial. To be honest I didn't crack open the CD, there wasn't enough code in the book that I considered useful for anything except, Console::WriteLine(). To say the least I will be returning the book, thus the reason for not cracking open the CD.
I was looking for good examples of managed and unmanaged C++ code, examples of how to migrate existing unmanaged code to the managed world, how to get C++ and C# to happily co-exist in the same implementation and examples of MFC, ATL and ATL Server in the managed environment. The best way to get this information is to download the beta version of VS and check out the help files.
The author states that the book is not intended to be a "bible" book, well why then does nearly half of the book have SDK information. Also the back of the book states, "All the information you need to create sophisticated Windows 2000 applications", I about gagged the only useful piece of code I could find is "Hello World" written in C#, the rest are just snippets. I'm sorry for ranting on this book; I hope Dr Reeves' COBOL Programming Using .NET Framework book to be released early next year is much more comprehensive.
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