Windows Shell Programming (with CD-ROM)

Rating:
Summary: Good starting point for shell programming...
Review: I picked this book up recently as a reference for a NSE project I'm working on. So far I've found the book excellent in that capacity. Whether or not the book will be useful to you depends on the amount of hand holding you need. As far as getting to relevant information quickly and a layout that lets chapters stand on their own; my needs were meet and I'm glad I purchased the book.

Another reviewer mentioned that the install CD doesn't work. The problem was actually a glitch with install shield and on some machines the REG entry describing the location of VC++ wizards is missing so the path is invalid and install shield reports your out of space in the destination folder(bla bla bla). But if you have the technical ability to copy the INCLUDE and LIB directories to your hard drive and add them to VC++ directories under options, and copy the wizard (AWX) files to the appropriate directory, you'll be ok - and if that's too difficult, you probably shouldn't be messing with the windows shell anyway.

This is of course detailed on Scott Seely's web page and he provides and email address for you to contact him with any questions. I did in fact email when I got stuck building an extension that was not backed by a directory structure and streamed IO through a java app to provide virtual remote access to a server through explorer; he responded quickly and was very helpful.

Anyone who is interested in these topics should also check out the newsgroup microsoft.public.platformsdk.ui_shell on server msnews.microsoft.com

Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: I really wanted to "wow" my friends by customizing the Windows shell. I bought this book and was able to do all sorts of great stuff. I now have my own screensavers running and a shell extension that I wrote which displays the Pokemon cards I've collected. The whole book was pretty easy to understand.

Rating:
Summary: Mom always said if I don't have anything nice to say....
Review: This book was awful. While it does cover a lot of useful topics it doesn't cover them well. The explanations of the Windows API functions were easier to understand in the MSDN documentation. Other then that the book was mostly realy bad wrapper classes for these functions. They were horribly over complicated, it took him 2 or 3 classes to make icon in the system tray and that didnt even include any mention of a callback funcion for handling menu's.
Also the CD doesn't install. In a newsgroup where people asked him about it, he said you had to have VC++ 6 because it checks for some stuff when you try and. Yet I do and have tried it on about 4 differant computers with no luck. You can still use the examples with some effort and spare time.
The only thing I realy found this book good for is as a jumping off point. With the MSDN documentation if you are trying to do something you haven't before (such as adding/removing taskbar buttons), it's hard to get anywhere. So I grab this book, look in table of contents, go to section on the taskbar, find just one fuction i can look up in the dev studio docs and I'm all set with that from there on out.