Norman Lawrence's book on CVF/Windows

[gfthomas8]

I haven't been able to find this in local bookstores or in the university library. The only review of it that I,ve seen was on amazon.com and it was so negative as to be unbelievable.

Is the book in any way useful?

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I am mystified by the amazon.com review - it flies in the face of everything I've heard from customers who bought the book. If you are already very familiar with the Win32 API, it may not do a lot for you, but it is an excellent tutorial on adding Win32 functionality to a Fortran program. I learned a lot from it.

Steve

[pcurtis]

I went and read the review on Amazon, and I pretty much agree with it. I waited for this book for a long time, with high hopes -- but in the meantime worked through Petzold, Richter, CVF examples, and so forth (and also wrote and debugged about 30K lines of Win32 code in CVF), so by the time this book was published it turned out to add nothing and be a huge disappointment. I find the level of discussion and detail very mystifying. The book simply lacks any coherent plan on how to expose the fundamentals of erecting a Win32 program from CVF, both from the CVF standpoint as well as from the Win32 standpoint; it is poor pedagogy, and also poor programming.

Actually, the CVF part is pretty straightforward, once you get on the Win32 wavelength, and in general it is no trouble at all to transpose from C to CVF when you are used to doing it. I recommend Richter's "Advanced Windows" book, which is far-and-away the best, clearest, most subtle treatment of Win32 programming I have found (and I have dozens of such books). Almost everything Richter talks about can be done wholly in CVF (with some interesting exceptions -- see my query in this forum on DLL injection).

[richpauir]

I have the book too. I can see where someone already familiar with Win32 would not care for this book. However, it was a big help to me as I was just starting to learn Win32 programming in general. It is vague in some place and I did have to use some other books to understand the fundamentals of objects, handles, threads, etc. But this is the only book I know of specifically for windows programming in CVF.