Professional Mfc With Visual C++5

Rating:
Summary: Best MFC book I've found yet
Review: Having a descent knowledge of Windows OO programing from Visual Foxpro, this book was the best I've found on MFC. It is NOT for pure novices, Mike expects reader to have a good amount of programming skills, but is not overly expectant of the reader. His style and detail make the book a joy to read. I especially liked the absense of pages and pages of sample code that many other books contain. It seems to be applicable to MS VC++ version 6, with very few discrepencies in the difference of versions.

Rating:
Summary: Very Very Good
Review: I've been an MFC prgrammer for over 3 years now, and until a couple of months ago I'd been consistently disappointed with all the MFC books I had seen (except perhaps"Inside VC++, D.J. Kruglinski" to some extent). But then I happened to lay my hands on this book by Mike Blaszczak and I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. The book is pretty big, but quite readable and the guy really knows what he is talking about. The chapters on Windows Common Controls, Doc/View and Multi-Threading are themselves worth the money. The coverage of ActiveX controls is adequate. If there is anything lacking, I would have loved to see some guidelines and samples on developing pure COM servers, as opposed to ActiveX controls, using MFC classes. (But unfortunately even the MSDN CDs do not seem to have any good articles or samples on that. Can Mike, or anyone else, point me in the right direction?)On the whole its a great book, and is worth buying for any serious MFC programmer.

Rating:
Summary: Meaderings 2
Review: Mike knows his topic. I know this from other dealings but the book does meander. As a resource the index is useless...less than useless. There are numerous places where he addresses a particular topic but only sights one page in the index. "Professional" ? I leave that to someone else. He does state that the book is for the professional developer. And I was not looking for a text book. But an idex is a tool. In this case used very pourly.

Rating:
Summary: Best MFC book I've seen
Review: Most MFC books are pretty interchangable: they start with "This is app wizard, this is class wizard", then progress through "Hello World", "This is a dialog box", "These are controls", "This is how to do basic (and I do mean basic) graphics", mention a few things about threads (not nearly enough), and end with "This should be enough to get you started - now go read the docs." This book, on the other hand, starts with "App/class wizard", then gets to the heart of windows programming with Doc/view architecture, and goes on from there to cover ALL of the common controls, as well as ODBC and DAO programming, advanced interface design, socket and internet programming, multithreaded programming, etc... Everything I've needed so far, I've been able to find in this book. It has lots of example code. The author tends to ramble, but his rambling has a point; it tends to illustrate some tangentially related topic that didn't fit anywhere else in the book. Nice big index, too. This book is not for beginners, tho.

Rating:
Summary: Not better than online documentation of MFC
Review: Yes a lot of digression. It just give you a starting point, rest is the information excess. You can find all these stuff in online help or in MFC reference. Believe me the online reference is much more readable. Also the visual impact of the pages are not well designed, no visual explanations (just screen shoots), no good diagrams, no remainders on the pages. It is formatted like source codes or abstract math books. In order to understand MFC command routing I should look at the online Help of VC++ 5.0 and draw my own diagrams spending 30 minutes. Namely, I had a start point but I should read the subject in somewhere else. This book doesnt give you a map on your road. A lot of details fill the pages, but as I wrote you can find all of these much more detailed and without digression in the online documentation of MFC. Buy another book!