Re: Good MFC Book

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"Daniel James" <wastebasket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:VA.00000c39.085b9b32@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> My usual recommendations for MFC are "the Prosise book" and "The
> Blaszczack
> book" - so named (by me) because the actual titles changed between
> editions
> and I can never remember what the most recent editions are called. Jeff
> Prosise gives more of a tutorial and Mike Blaszczack more of a reference
> guide, but theirs are the best books I've seen.

While I have both editions of the Prosise book, I actually prefer the first
edition where the concentration is on understanding what the code is doing
rather than what code the wizards generate. Both editions are excellent
though.

I picked up the Blaszczack book some time ago in the bargain bin and have
never regretted it. While it is never my first choice to pick out as a
reference, if I am stuck on an unusual problem or if I simply need a greater
understanding of an area of MFC, his book usually finds its way out onto my
desk and is usually the one that helps.

>
> There's also "MFC Internals" for advanced hacking with MFC. A lot of good
> info about how MFC works, but it stops short of telling you how to use
> that
> info to do anything new -- probably because the authors want you to buy
> their toolkit instead. It's rather dated now, though, and hasn't been
> revised/updated and so can't really be recommended.

I have that book and while I don't really share your first complaint, the
second is dead on. The book is simply outdated. While you can gain some
insight, since the MFC internals have changed so much since VC++ 5 when the
book was first published, you'll find many dead ends. Much of the
interesting materiel made it's way into the Inside Visual C++ book when they
took over for the late David K.

If you can get it cheap, the book may be worth your while, but don't expect
it to explain the new CString implementation or any of the MFC containers.

-Pete


.

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