From: frank_cavallito@csg.stercomm.com
Sent: Monday, September 29, 1997 3:57 PM
To: Duncan, Ray
Subject: Re[2]: Advanced Win32 Programming
I understand the M$ "moving target API" - their vision of the future is generally whatever is available for sale today.
I have found some similarity between the Win32 API and OS/2 - I've had some code that I've migrated with little more than a name change. (not surprising - a lot of the code was done by the same group).
At any rate, it was nice to talk to you again, and to see your name in print (if for just for book reviews)
Frank
______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: RE: Advanced Win32 Programming
Author: "Duncan , Ray" <rduncan@xchg.peds.csmc.edu>
Date: 9/29/97 2:04 PM
Nah, I'm tired of chasing Microsoft APIs, life is too short.
______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
From: frank_cavallito@csg.stercomm.com
Sent: Monday, September 29, 1997 2:25 PM
To: Duncan, Ray
Subject: Advanced Win32 Programming
Just as I was telling my Assembler SIG (North Texas PC Users Group) during a presentation on Win32 Assembler programming that sadly, there was no book by Ray Duncan on "Advanced Win32 Programming" (in the tradition of "Advanced MS-DOS Programming" or "Advanced OS/2 Programming"), I noticed your address on some book reviews in the DDJ WebSite.
Whatever happened to "Advanced Win32 Programming" ???? Believe it or not, I still find both the MS-DOS and OS/2 books useful, and I assume that a similar book on Win32 would be as useful.
Frank Cavallito
From: ROSEMARY TURNER
Reply To: rt66@worldnet.att.net
Sent: Sunday, September 28, 1997 6:07 PM
To: Duncan, Ray
Subject: Book Reviews
Dear Sir: I'm quite disappointed by the technical nature of books you review. There are some of us, mainly seniors, who are new to computers and to the Internet. We don't have a lot of money, and maybe we are too frail to attend classes. Book reviews of beginner books could be invaluable us. We are truly the forgotten generation even though our tax dollars for half a century or more have been supporting all the young people and their education. Perhaps your focus must be technical. Are you aware of any sites that have book reviews for beginners? Please don't insult our intelligence with those horrid Dummie books written by Dummies. I despise these books, the title offends me and the contents are not even well written. Books like that pander to the insecurity of the beginner. I am not dumb, I am uninformed. There is a difference.
Thank you for listening to an old lady who loves her computer and the Internet and just wants to buy a few books that would help her to understand her wonderful machine. I have Windows 95, Corel Word Perfect, Dashboard and Netscape Navigator. I have many senior pals all over the world who feel as I do and I speak for all these friends.
Rosemary
Dear Rosemary:
I sympathize with your request and I especially agree with your sentiments about the infamous series of "Dummies" books. Although... there is, I must confess, a certain gratifying irony in certain of the book titles in that book line. At any rate, we have limited resources and budget here at ERCB, and I feel that it's important to keep our web site tightly focused on something I feel comfortable with and have a lot of experience with, viz., software development.
There are book reviews of the type you are longing for available on the Web. I recommend you take a look at the web sites of the Ziff Davis publications such as PC Magazine. Also try InfoWorld Electric and PC World On-Line. Other ERCB readers may be able to offer you some additional suggestions. Good luck!
-- Ray Duncan
From: Gregory V. Wilson
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 1997 5:55 AM
To: Duncan, Ray
Subject: interest
Hi again. I had two email messages last night from people who'd bumped into the "Nonexistent Books" article, and were posting notes on various newsgroups. Notes included below.
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 21:37:41 -0500 (CDT)
From: Cameron Laird <claird@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM>
To: gvwilson@interlog.com
Subject: "... A Review of Non-Existent Books"
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,comp.software-eng,alt.memetics
Of whom do you think when you see that "Subject:" line? 'Sounds like Borges and/or Lem to me; as it turns out, though, it's someone still living, Gregory V. Wilson,who subtly and artfully makes several important points about software engineering, publishing, pedagogy, and imagination in his article at <URL: http://www.ercb.com/feature/feature.0012.html>. An ongoing fascination of mine is how much better certain reviews can be than their nominal objects; now Mr. Wilson has given an existence proof that this paradoxical state can be reached without the objects even existing.
Cameron Laird
http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html
claird@NeoSoft.com +1 713 996 8546 FAX
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 1997 05:37:21 -0500 (CDT)
From: Jorn Barger <jorn@Mcs.Net>
Subject: Tools for parsing hypertexts?
Newsgroups: comp.text,alt.hypertext
[what other newsgroups does this question fit better in?]
The quoted text below is not really a review of an existing book, it's a proposal for a book that Gregory V. Wilson (gvwilson@interlog.com) would *like* to see someone write. (There are many more like this at <URL:http://www.ercb.com/feature/feature.0012.html>. ***Highly*** recommended.)
I suspect this idea is utterly brilliant, but I hardly know how to think about it yet, so I'm interested in other opinions.
Imaginary book review:
> Software Tools for the World-Wide Web
>
> Software Tools was one of the most influential books in the
history of
> computing, as it introduced a whole generation of programmers
to the
> Unix philosophy of tool-based computing. In retrospect, one of
the
> reasons the Unix tools were so successful was that they all
worked
> with a single, universal data format, namely strings of ASCII
text,
> terminated by newline characters. One of the reasons that
tool-based
> computing hasn't taken root in other environments (such as
Microsoft
> Windows) is that no such format exists. The internal structure
of a
> Microsoft Word .doc file, for example, bears little
resemblance to
> that of an Excel spreadsheet.
>
> The author of this book begins by arguing that in fact a new
universal
> data format does exist: HTML. Unlike newline-terminated
ASCII,
> however, HTML has a nested structure, which is difficult for
the
> streaming model of Unix to handle. In the first ten chapters
of this
> book, the author therefore develops a suite of tree
transformation
> utilities, which can be used to parse, re-arrange, and output
HTML.
> These utilities are more sophisticated than the cat, grep, and
sed of
> the original Software Tools, but, as their starting point is
also more
> sophisticated (a Java class library that contains regular
expressions
> and other parsing tools), the overall cognitive burden is
about the
> same. Where the original Software Tools concentrated on
parsing and
> text formatting, this book concentrates on page layout and
data
> mining, i.e. on the things that make the World-Wide Web more
than just
> "FTP with pictures".
>
> The final two chapters of this book take the tools built in
the
> previous ten, and construct a simple dataflow GUI for
combining them.
> With a few mouse clicks, users can create pipelines (or even
task
> farms, for those lucky enough to have multiprocessors) of
HTML
> filters, then set the controls of each. With another mouse
click, the
> resulting multi-filter can be turned into a standalone
Java
> applet---the 1990s equivalent of simple C-shell script.
>
From: Tom Brown
Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 1997 9:03 AM
To: Duncan, Ray
Subject: Review of Petzold's Programming Windows 95
First of all, I agree with you on several points:
The book is marketing gloss over Programming Windows 3.1 which was marketing gloss on top of Programming Windows 3.0. He has done little to add to it, ignoring many of the new features of the operating systems.
My contention is with the statement that he ignores MFC. This is OK!!! There is nothing wrong with him ignoring MFC. In fact I will argue that he SHOULD ignore MFC. If you want to learn MFC, buy the sister book by Jeff Prosise, Programming Windows 95 with MFC.
Petzold is all about the Windows API. If he switched to MFC the world would lose its last great resource on API level programming. There are already too many books on MFC and precious few books about what's going on under the hood. Too many programmers only know MFC and therefore are extremely limited in what they can do. You have to understand what's going on underneath to be truly versatile and capable.
Yes, if you own one of the two older books, you don't need this book. But if you don't, then you do. Every C/C++ programmer for Windows should have this as a reference text.
I would love him to do some work and expand this to cover the new API's in Win 95 and NT, but for him to drop the API altogether would be travesty for the industry.
Tom Brown
tbrown@rocsinc.com