Microsoft Win32 Developer's Reference Library (Dv-Microsoft Professional) Abridged Edition

These books have the same information of MSDN Library CD and Internet Site. For that one who has access to them, these books are almost useless.

First and foremost, my favorite volume in this five volume sets is volume #1 - Base Services. This volume will most likely be on your desk instead of the shelf. Base Services will definitely give you an edge in writing a multithreaded application. It doesn't teach you how to write multithreaded app, but it sure contain invaluable information that aid in building a SOLID program where multithread enter the scene. This volume cover topics such as processes, threads, dll, ipc, thread synchronization, file system, and the memory management in Win32 (get your highlight pen ready for this chapter).Volume 2 & 3 cover user and graphic device interfaces. If you're comfortable with MFC, these two volumes will probably be sitting on the shelf and collect dust. You only need these volumes as last resort if you can't find the documentation in question anywhere else.Volume 4 & 5 deal with Common controls and Windows Shell respectively. Common controls volume is some what vague compare to its counter part documentations in MFC classes for the Visual C++ reference set. The Shell on the other hand, is pretty comprehensive in covering the interfaces for the many areas that you normally do with Windows desktop like dragdrop, lauching an application, moving copying files, folders, etc...

This reference will save you time if you are coding win32<developer> and creating classes based on MFC, newbies and students may be overwhelmed by infomation without much elaboration. More application notes could have been included. The strange thing is finding the first 35 pages of all the 5 volumes the same(adverts?)(35 * 5 = 175 ! ). However if you serious about your Win programming, you need this kind of reference.

The reference collection is broken into five logical topics: Base Services, User Interface, Common Controls, GDI, and Shell. Each book completely covers messages, interfaces, APIs, etc. relevant to a topic in *one* spot, rather than spread out throughout the entire collection. This organization makes it much easier to confidently get your hands around a particular technology area without worry of missing something that is buried elsewhere in the collection.The Shell volume (#5) was particularly useful. Until now, I found it hard to get a single, complete source of information regarding this everchanging topic.As a professional Win32 developer, I found it useful to quickly thumb through every page of each volume to look for messages, APIs, and interfaces that crept into Windows unnoticed over the past several years.It's great to have a concise reference that I can put my hands on.