Teach Yourself Windows CE Programming in 24 Hours [With CDROM]

The book somewhat delivered on its promise back when it was still called WinCE (I'm pretty sure this book won't work for post 2.0 WinCE versions). Unfortunately, at the time I had to fork out $1k for a development platform which would allow me to compile some code for my WinCE machines. This is ridiculous. Why should I pay for the privilage of developing on Microsoft's platform? In the end, I came to the conclusion that Windows CE itself is pretty worthless. Too many drawbacks, and there isn't much point in it with out a better UI stuck on it. Presumably later versions have found a niche as background OS for PalmOS, and for fancy cell phones.

I bought this book not knowing a lick of Win32 API programming, so I had to take a crash course in Win32 programming first, as the book starts off assuming you know the API. Thankfully, it leaves MFC and ATL to the last chapter and focuses solely on C and the API.One problem I had with the book is that the examples in the text are often quite wrong in terms of number/use of parameters, and leave out some details that can be misleading. Besides the examples, the text has frequent misleading information (p.44: "First you can call the CommandBar_InsertButton() function..." Later on the same page: "The other function you can use to add buttons is the CommandBar_InsertButton() function..." - the first quote should have said CommandBar_AddButton())If you are paying attention and following the book closely, you will weed out these inconsistencies, though, and should come out of it with respectable knowledge of CE.