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Rating: 
Summary: Not very informative
Review: All this book does is tell you what to click/type to make a few things that you will never need to do happen. It doesn't even explain basic variables and program control structures until the appendix. The author does not stop to explain the parameters passed to various equations and does not even touch TCP/IP.I can't really think of anything good to say about this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Great beginner's book!
Review: I haven't programmed in C++ in about 4 years now, so I was looking for a refresher course to take me straight from the ground up again. This book fulfilled all my expectations: the 3 appendices (entitled Learning C/C++ Quickly, parts I, II and III) got my terminology and C++ basic concepts back up to speed in a day, and each of the "days" in the book gave me specific examples to work with so that everything stuck. The directions get a bit tedious at times; for example, every chapter starts with the same proceedure that was covered in Day 1 (creating a workspace) and I ended up skipping probably about 50 pages of the text because of repitition of previous lessons. Still, this book is excellent, and I recommend it to ANYONE wanting to learn or relearn Visual C++.
Rating: 
Summary: I believe this is helpful to a target audience. ME!
Review: I thought this book was useful because I was the one targeted. By the way you can use this with Visual C++ 6.0 The target audience are NOT C++ beginners. The target audience is actually people who need to be walked through the various features of the MSVC product interface. For this particular target audience, the book excels (read the other reviews with this in mind). The author repeats the project startup steps (initially this irked me) for the people who need to do a specific task, like writing a DLL (You know you're the one). MSVC 6 gives you extra wizards for DLLs BTW. I would recommend this book to people who already have C++ experience, and need to learn yet another NEW interface from Microsoft. If you ARE a C++ beginner, the end of the book (Appendices) has information which explains to you what variables are, scope, classes, structures, etc... The information is limited, but if you are a real programmer you should be able to muddle through. You should step through every example and after it works, continue to tweak it so you can see how the tweaking affects the program.
Rating: 
Summary: So many pages, so little content
Review: I'm an experienced DOS C programmer, and I needed a book to help jumpstart me into Win 95 programming. I skimmed through the contents and thought, "Great, it contains what I want to learn!". Until I started reading the damned thing, that is. It's not so much the subject matter, as it is the lack of depth which is the problem. The author spends far too much explaining the same stupid steps ("Click here, and here, and here, etc") over and over without going into any relevant detail. The examples are painfully primitive, and trying to create apps with any sort of functionality resulted in lots of fishing in the MSDN Library. If you're an absolute beginner to Visual C++, then this book will give you a good feel for the basics. Unfortunately, that's about all it contains.
Rating:
Summary: Great Starting Point!
Review: This book does a great job of getting a novice C++ programmer to the point of writing useful windows programs. While it cleary lacks some depth in explaining C++ concepts, C++ is not what it intends to teach. It's a Visual C++ guide. If you want to quickly have knowledge in making basic windows applications, and have some C++ background this is a wonderful resource.
Rating:
Summary: Great Starting Point!
Review: This book does a great job of getting a novice C++ programmer to the point of writing useful windows programs. While it cleary lacks some depth in explaining C++ concepts, C++ is not what it intends to teach. It's a Visual C++ guide. If you want to quickly have knowledge in making basic windows applications, and have some C++ background this is a wonderful resource.
Rating:
Summary: Good for amateurs like me
Review: This book fills a specific niche and has been very useful to me. I already knew C and C++ from college courses and some self-teaching but have programmed almost exclusively in DOS or on Unix. Gurewich & Gurewich teach you how to port this knowledge to Windows95/MFC. I'm a psychologist and so I've been trying to write code for a simple experiment. If I'd had to write it without this book using just Microsoft's documentation, well, it would take me at least a month longer to write. As it is, I finished in three days. The book is ideal for writing simple, graphical, windows-based applications like those. The style of the text is going to be liked by some and hated by others. The authors do every example in extremely close detail to make sure you do them right. Each chapter consists of one or two example programs that demonstrate a few features of MFC. It gives you just enough knowledge that you have a prayer of using the MFC documentation included with Visual C++ to actually find what you're looking for. I've also been surprised to find it makes a good reference book while programming, despite the layout being a teaching-based layout. If you do the examples you can actually remember where you saw particular types of operations and go find them. The chapters are set up in a logical fashion and so even if you don't remember exactly where you saw something, you can probably find it. You also won't need 21 days to finish it... I did it in less than a week.
Rating:
Summary: Very informative, a great learning book.
Review: Yes, this book may be somewhat repetitive, yes, it may not go over some of the newer technologies in great detail, but what do you expect from a book meant for total beginners? I found this book very easy to understand. It brings you from a know-nothing wannabe-programmer to being somewhat knowledgable in the realm of programming. It covers the basics, I/O, buttons, menus, ActiveX controls, and so forth. The book may be repetitive, but it gets everything in your head. Also, the excercises at the end of each chapter are great, and are an excellent tool to help enforce what you just learned. I would recommend this for anyone who wants to learn Visual C++.
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