Windows System Programming

The best thing about this book, in my opinion, is numerous comparisons that Mr. Hart makes between UNIX and Windows. As a recent Computer Science graduate, all of my system programming experience was in a UNIX environment. (My university used that OS for programming assignment exclusively.) After graduating, however, I found myself in a job that uses Windows. From school, I was familiar with the things I needed to do - parallel programming, sockets, services, but I had no idea how to actually implement such things in Windows. Mr. Hart's direct comparisons to UNIX gave me a frame of reference that made it easier for me to learn the subject matter quicker. Also, the book's four chapters on multithreaded programming have been extremely insightful and indispensable. Mr. Hart writes "when defects do occur [in a multithreaded application], as they will, code inspection ... often is the most effective in finding and fixing the defects' root causes" (pg. 309). If you don't have the necessary knowledge, staring at the code all day won't do you a bit of good. Mr. Hart's fantastic coverage of this subject has helped me understand the fundamentals of this difficult programming paradigm. In addition, the information on Structured Exception Handling (SEH) and Unicode was very helpful and informative. Lastly, I found this book to be very useful because it is very up-to-date. I would highly recommend this book.

This book is roughly the same as Steven's "Advanced Programing in the Unix Environment". It gets you in touch with the moving pieces of the Windows operating system.Bring with you a strong understanding of C/C++ and some experience administrating a Windows system and you can be up and running banging against the operating system's APIs. Open network sockets, play with "Thread Local Storage", create and register your very own service, interface with the security system, whack around the registry, and a dozen other ways to shoot yourself in the foot or get some actual work done.This book has almost nothing about making windows, graphics, sounds, or anything else that will help you get started making yet another accounting application. If that's what you are looking for look somewhere else.This book also comes threateningly close to being a good beginners guide to porting *nix applications to the Windows operating system. The author draws many parallels to various *nix utilities and how to write their equivalent using Windows' APIs.For those that like plenty of rope to hang themselves, this is the book for you. I enjoyed learning about the various facilities Windows provides the developer, and feel that this book helped me gain a better understanding of where to look first for doing fairly common relatively low-level tasks.

John Hart has done a fabulous job of expanding and updating his coverage of Win32 system programming. Unique in it's perspective of educating programmers familiar with UNIX or a similar OS, this book explains the landscape of Win32 operating systems, how they relate to each other and what features are present or missing from each of them.With almost 150 pages of new material, John digs way beneath the surface and covers new topics such as advanced thread synchronization, sockets, Windows 2000, Win64, and performance comparisons of multiple ways to solve a problem. Many existing topics are also updated and have new sample programs.The appendix cross reference of Win32, UNIX, and C runtime library APIs that was in the first edition has also been revisitied and expanded. A very valuable resource for anyone new to either OS or working with both.In short, if you are coming to Win32 from a UNIX background this is definitely the book for you. If you're already a crack Win32 programmer, you'll probably learn a lot as well.

Mr Hart has produced a detailed and authoritative account of the Win32 subsystem interface. Rather than many texts which simply list the Win32 API, Hart adds considerable value by introducing essential "how-to" design considerations which will simplify the life of any Windows NT/95 developer. Win32 System Programming tackles many difficult topics, such as synchronization issues, fibers, file handling, asynch I/O and error processing. These are presented in a way that is understandable to both newcomers and more experienced developers. As well as introducing these individual concepts, the reader feels as though the author understands the 'big picture'- there are common links of discussion throughout the text. I would suggest that all Windows developers would benefit from an understanding of the material this work contains. Experienced readers will appreciate the sound foundations of Operating System and in particular Concurrency theory on which this text is based, whereas beginners will find an essential core reference to support further forrays into the world of Win32 development. Not all aspects of Win32 are covered, in particular coverage of the GUI is ommitted- however the book is not sold on this basis. I believe that developers armed with the information in Win32 System Programming will have a considerable advantage in approaching many important subjects in the future. For example, there is a very revealing insight into the techniques used in Hart's application server designs and the threading model used in COM. In short- it contains information that every developer must know if they are to successfully develop reliable and performant applications for the Windows 32 platform. This text may also be relevant to students of Operating Systems. I for one will eagerly await a second edition!

This books fills a gap and is a great concise intro to many Win32 topics. Even if you've already been through Richter's _Advanced Windows_ there are many nuggets here that make it a great companion volume. The author, John Hart, is very responsive to userfeedback. Here's the table of contents: Chapter 1Windows NT and Windows 95 Chapter 2 Getting Started with Win32 Chapter 3 Using the Win32 File System and Character I/O Chapter 4 Direct File Access and File Attributes Chapter 5 Structured Exception Handling Chapter 6 Memory Management and Memory-Mapped Files Chapter 7 Security Chapter 8 Process Management Chapter 9 Interprocess Communication Chapter 10 Threads and Scheduling Chapter 11 Win32 Synchronization Chapter 12 Dynamic Link Libraries, In-Process Servers, and the ISAPI Chapter 13 Asynchronous Input/Output Chapter 14 Other Topics: Fibers, the Registry, and Beyond Appendix A Using the Sample Programs Appendix B Win32, UNIX, and C Library Comparisons Appendix C Performance Results