Advanced Windows

This book is a fantastic reference for Windows programmers. However, as others below have mentioned, its fourth release is now available under the title "Programming Applications for Microsoft Windows." If you're comfortable with Windows programming and are looking to get into some of the meatier areas, check it out.

Jeffrey Richter's Advanced Windows is easily the most frequently used (and borrowed) book on my computer bookshelf. It is well written, complete, and contains descriptions and examples of non-GUI Windows programming you simply can not find anywhere else. I plan on buying both of his new books as well. All of his books are utterly without hype - it's like reading just the meaty parts of MSJ/MSDN magazine. Long Live Jeff Richter!

Excellent book.Read it just to know what it covers, then you can forget about those tricky functions, but do not forget where you saw them being used. When later you have a problem that may be resolved by one of those functions, just open the book and get your problem resolved.

For UNIX, you buy W. Richard Stevens' Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment and UNIX Network Programming -- for Win32 you buy Programming Windows by Charles Petzold and this book. Petzold gets you started, Richter lets you pursue the good stuff.Although this is easily a 5 star book, it is not without room for improvement. For the 4th edition, Mr. Richter, I'd like to see Anonymous and Named Pipes covered, as well as Mailslots, and some introductory coverage of Winsock (Winsock could be covered in a separate book.)It's a bit surprising that those topics aren't covered, since just about every advanced topic I was looking for was covered in excellent detail.To be in the same class as Stevens' books, I'd like to see some performance considerations included. For example, how much more expensive is a Mutex over Critical Sections and Events? Ralph Davis' book, Win32 Network Programming, covers this a little better, and includes quite a bit of discussion on advanced Win32 topics besides the networking APIs.And lastly, a hard-bound edition would be nice.

Before reading this book I had a good grasp of C++ but didn't know much of the Win32 API except some of the function names I was really interested in. After sitting down for 2 - 3 weeks with the MSDN Library, Visual C++ and Advanced Windows I now have a firm grasp of most concepts. This book does not go into GUI development at all. I would recommend Programming Windows Fifth Edition for this. Since most of the code I write is for the backend (DLLs, Databases) my prefered GUI is always a web application so this was very desirable for me.If you want MFC you should probably get the Microsoft Mastering series title.If you want GUI get Programming Windows Fifth Edition.If you want hard core, Win32... GET THIS BOOK!