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Review
“If you’re writing a native Win32 program or just want to know what the OS is really doing underneath, you need John’s book. He covers the stuff that real systems programmers absolutely must know. Recommended.”
–Chris Sells, Microsoft Corporation
“This fourth edition does a great job of incorporating new features in the Vista, Windows 2008, and Windows 7 API, but also stays true to teaching the foundational elements of building applications that target the Windows OS.”
–Jason Beres, Product Management, Infragistics
Product Description
“If you’re writing a native Win32 program or just want to know what the OS is really doing underneath, you need John’s book. He covers the stuff that real systems programmers absolutely must know. Recommended.”
–Chris Sells, Microsoft Corporation
“This fourth edition does a great job of incorporating new features in the Vista, Windows 2008, and Windows 7 API, but also stays true to teaching the foundational elements of building applications that target the Windows OS.”
–Jason Beres, Product Management, Infragistics
The Definitive Guide to Windows API Programming, Fully Updated for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Vista
Windows System Programming, Fourth Edition, now contains extensive new coverage of 64-bit programming, parallelism, multicore systems, and many other crucial topics. Johnson Hart’s robust code examples have been updated and streamlined throughout. They have been debugged and tested in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, on single and multiprocessor systems, and under Windows 7, Vista, Server 2008, and Windows XP. To clarify program operation, sample programs are now illustrated with dozens of screenshots.
Hart systematically covers Windows externals at the API level, presenting practical coverage of all the services Windows programmers need, and emphasizing how Windows functions actually behave and interact in real-world applications. Hart begins with features used in single-process applications and gradually progresses to more sophisticated functions and multithreaded environments. Topics covered include file systems, memory management, exceptions, processes, threads, synchronization, interprocess communication, Windows services, and security.
New coverage in this edition includes
- Leveraging parallelism and maximizing performance in multicore systems
- Promoting source code portability and application interoperability across Windows, Linux, and UNIX
- Using 64-bit address spaces and ensuring 64-bit/32-bit portability
- Improving performance and scalability using threads, thread pools, and completion ports
- Techniques to improve program reliability and performance in all systems
- Windows performance-enhancing API features available starting with Windows Vista, such as slim reader/writer locks and condition variables
A companion Web site, jmhartsoftware.com, contains all sample code, Visual Studio projects, additional examples, errata, reader comments, and Windows commentary and discussion.
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Customer Reviews
The book is well written and very readable. There are plenty of examples in the book, and they are supported by a downloadable ZIP file that contains the actual code that you can simply compile & run. The only criticism I have about the examples is that they could be a little better explained. Some things are left to the reader to sort out. However, if you already know C or C++ this should not be too difficult
This is not a book for C & C++ beginners. It is bang up to date & covers all versions of the API from the earliest versions of Windows to the latest versions, even referring to the emerging Win64 technology.
I would recommend this book to anyone who needs to go beyond standard C / C++ or even go beyond MFC. It would also be useful to anyone who needs to know what goes on 'behind the scenes' in Windows or MFC.
Many of the concepts addressed in this text are familiar to me (multi-threading, security, etc), but only as implemented through the .NET framework. Even if I never write any production code in these areas, it's made me a better .NET developer now that I have a more in-depth understanding of the Windows API. I would absolutely recommend this book to .NET software engineers - even if you never write a line of code against the Windows API directly, it will give you a much broader understanding of what Windows is doing at a lower level. Just ensure that you have at least a basic understanding of C first - this is a prerequisite.
Although this book does cover bits of the C run-time library, it concentrates more on what the Windows API can do for you that the C run-time cannot. This particularly showed through in the section on file handling. For someone like me who started working with the C and the C run-time library 20+ years ago, has worked with Windows APIs since the very first version of MS Windows appeared, worked with C++ for more than 10 years and worked on numerous UNIX projects too (often with code portable between Windows and UNIX), this book provides numerous reminders of why I should consider Windows APIs instead of C run-time libraries on projects where I don't need my code to be portable to UNIX. That's the key thing though - for an experienced developer this book largely acts as a reminder or as a trigger to go investigate certain things further, for rarely did it feel like an authoritative guide to the topics included. It is good, but not authoritative enough to be worthy of 5 stars. For example, my speciality is high-performance, multi-threaded servers handling protocols such as TCP/IP. Although this book covers multi-threading fairly well (although not brilliantly), I was particularly disappointed by the Sockets coverage - I could be wrong but I got the impression that the author prefers other interfaces to the Sockets API. Similarly, structured exception handling was covered very well, and file handling and memory handling pretty well, but the section on services felt a bit lightweight.
Example code in the book appears to be pretty good, although I have spotted a few minor issues. I haven't checked the errata on the author's web-site, but would hope that corrections do appear there.
So to conclude - yes, I think any serious Windows developer (particularly if writing server apps) should have a copy of this alongside books such as Jeffrey Richter's Programming Applications for Microsoft Windows, but having said that, I suspect that most people will think of Jeffrey Richter as the more authoritative even if in need of an update (which is planned to be happening later this year under a new title).
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