Writing Windows Wdm Device Drivers: Covers Nt 4, Win 98, and Win 2000

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Summary: user friendly reading, outstanding chapter on system setup
Review: Chris Cant writes (and draws!) in a user friendly sytle which makes the book easier to read than most. Along his way, he stops to note many important side points which other, more down-to-business books might not (e.g. noting that when running setenv under win98, you will first need to increase your environment size.) The chapter entitled "WDM Driver Environment" gives you a complete guide to setting up your WDM development systems for Win98 and Win2000, with a tremendous amount of detail - and when it comes to setting up, you can never give too much detail. Had I had that chapter when I first set up my systems to compile WDM drivers, I would have saved a good number of hours.

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Summary: full of errors
Review: get Oney's book instead - it's more readable and the examples actually work...

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Summary: No useful information
Review: I found no useful information at all in this book. I developed a PCI device driver with DMA capabilities, and hoped that this book could give me some valuable hints on the subject. It did not. Nor did it give any clues on how to handle plug and play or power management. It looks as though the author just put some small WDM driver together, saw that it worked quite good, and then wrote a book about it.

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Summary: Great entry point for beginners.
Review: I needed to write a Windows device driver to do parallel port I/O on NT machines and handle hardware interrupts. The DDK is incomprehensible to novices. The Viscarola / Mason book is a great reference, but is not a good how-to. Oney has lots of important information on lots of important topics, but you can quickly get lost in tons of details that don't apply to the task at hand. Chris Cant gets it right in his book. His pedagogical strategy is to actually create a very small device driver, and then study it as you layer on the complexity, and not hit you with it all at once. It exactly addressed my primary needs. Its drawback is that it is not very detailed, nor is it a good advanced reference, so the ideal solution is to get all three books, and use them each for their own strength. But start with Chris Cant's. (He also includes a couple of very useful utilities, one of which is a marvelous debugging tool.)

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Summary: Not a very good book for non USB driver writers
Review: I purchased this book back in July when no other WDM books were available. Overall, I found the book didn't answer any of my concerns and was considerably lacking details for non-USB drivers. For example, there is no explaination on controling DMA transfers. All my NT driver books, have an entire chapter devoted to the subject! The PNP section was repetive but not clear. Overall, not a very good driver book.

Rating:
Summary: Not so usefull
Review: I've found this book chaotic, and not very informative. It doesn't cover many topics like DMA and Direct I/O mode. I think this book can be more useful after reading any book covering NT drivers in details.