Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Programming References for the Win32 Environment?

Posted by Cliff on from the MFC-Bible-and-its-420-commandments dept.

Pablo asks: "I have to do some programming in Windows (for school, not by choice). To say that I know jack-all about Windows programming would be flattering myself. I never do any programming under *NIX without my trusty copy of Stevens' 'Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment' by my side. I'm wondering if there is an equivalent 'bible' reference book for Windows programming. Does anyone have any recommendations?"

1 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. the legacy of m$ windows by mmphosis · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Use free (gratis) and free (open source, GPL) portable development tools. Some popular dev tools: cygwin, java, perl, php, python and others. Stop using costly, proprietary, platform-specific tools. vi$ual$tudio is not visual, it is an ugly cumbersome interface wrapping an ugly command line poor excuse for a compiler. I hear that programmers at m$ don't even use it. In learning to use m$ tools I eventually learned the wisdom in avoiding using these tools. Historically, Win32 APIs are derived from Win16 APIs derived from Excel for DOS (a GUI spreadsheet with windows) ported from Excel for Macintosh that used the Macintosh APIs. The Win APIs still look very similar to the original Macintosh APIs. Learn to wrap(hide and bury) these ugly APIs in your own real portable functions/classes. Don't ever call someone else's functions directly. For example, create a function myRunMainEventLoop that works for Windows, Macintosh, OpenGL, KDE, Gnome, pure XWindows and whatever platform.