Book Review: The Windows Programming Puzzle Book

Review: The Windows Programming Puzzle Book

The Windows Programming Puzzle Book
Kim Crouse
John Wiley & Sons
438 pages, USD $29.95
ISBN 0-672-30858-4

Usually, Windows programming books are quite boring. They try to tell you how to do things, but sometimes you just need a quick answer on questions like how to get a custom window accept double-clicks. And it wouldn't be so bad if learning would also be fun.

Well, this time the impossible is indeed possible. Kim Crouse has written an in-depth, detailed and comprehensive book to better 16-bit Windows programming with C/C++. And, unlike most books, this one really is entertaining.

The book has 101 puzzles, which range from windowing, GDI painting and memory management all the way through to dialog boxes, DLLs and system programming. All these puzzles are from the Real World, and they range from quite simple (such as how to make a custom window move when dragged) to advanced (how to write a task walker).

The excellent thing with this book is the fact that not all the questions are the general "How do I..." style. Instead, there are for example "what's wrong with this routine", "can routine XXX be called from a DLL" and "must XXX be called after YYY" styles of puzzles. Of course, you get solutions with full descriptions and code samples to clarify the puzzle at hand. As such, this book is not only a "how to" book but it makes a great reference book too.

Of course, some of these problems are only interesting if you're programming down in the API level. For example, things like how to draw transparent text seem trivial when using Delphi, for example. Still, if you're going to do Windows 3.1 programming, this book really is worth its price. The only thing that decrades this book's excellent ratings is that it should be twice as thick! Four of five stars.

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