Professional MFC with Vc++5 Programming [With CD]

This book is one of the most helpful and informative books on MFC there is, no you don't have to be a expert to read it but you do need some good foundation knowledge of MFC to understand it. as for the dips that give it 1 star, if you notice they complain about the most basic elements such as working with check boxes, placing checks in checkboxes, sorry people but that's beginning MFC not PROFESSIONAL

Thanks Mike! I spend over $1000 every year on new books too. This book frustrated me at first when I knew nothing about MFC and little more than Petzold's well written text. But after scouring other MFC books and learning the DevStudio, this book proved invaluable. It is not a book for beginners, but every experienced C++ programmer developing in Windows must have this book. Mike's style is relaxed, accurate, thorough yet entertaining. His coverage of the Multi Doc-View architecture is great! I also loved the discussion on customizing menus and controls on the fly. This book paid for itself many of thousands of times over. Caution: if you own any book with "for Dummies" in the title, this book is not for you.

Finally, a book that explains what is REALLY going on behind the scenes in MFC! Most of the books I have read on Visual C++ are just fancy tutorials (now add this line here, now do this, etc). Blaszczak takes the time to explain the "why's" of MFC, not just the how's. Don't buy this if you are new to Windows Programming. I would recommend reading Petzold's book first and making sure that you have a good understanding of C++. Definitely not for beginners.

I've been an MFC prgrammer for over 3 years now, and until a couple of months ago I'd been consistently disappointed with all the MFC books I had seen (except perhaps"Inside VC++, D.J. Kruglinski" to some extent). But then I happened to lay my hands on this book by Mike Blaszczak and I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. The book is pretty big, but quite readable and the guy really knows what he is talking about. The chapters on Windows Common Controls, Doc/View and Multi-Threading are themselves worth the money. The coverage of ActiveX controls is adequate. If there is anything lacking, I would have loved to see some guidelines and samples on developing pure COM servers, as opposed to ActiveX controls, using MFC classes. (But unfortunately even the MSDN CDs do not seem to have any good articles or samples on that. Can Mike, or anyone else, point me in the right direction?) On the whole its a great book, and is worth buying for any serious MFC programmer.

First of all, Mike Blaszczak is, as I understand it, the lead programmer for the MFC development team. I think the best thing about this book is that it offers insights into WHY MFC works the way it does. He explains why you want to implement things one way instead of another, and gives good reasons, based on the framework's architecture as to why. As for completeness: It's 1061 pages long. It covers just about everything in MFC that you could be interested in. And what it covers, it covers in adequate or more than adequate detail. The book's organization is the best I've seen of any MFC book. I know exactly where to go to find the information I'm interested in. This book works well as both a reference, and reading from front to back. Personally, I've jumped around from chapter to chapter, but have read almost the entire book at this point. In a phrase: "The best programming book I have EVER read." I've got about 500 of them to compare with.