Best book

[grahamr (work)]

Recently I've been working with images and Device Contexts - something I've never really done much of in the past. So I've decided to purchase a book on the subject.

I was going to order Charles Petzold's book, but I was wondering if anyone else had any recommendations. I really need a book on the nuts and bolts of MFC, something that goes into handling bitmaps and the like but not into 3D graphics (I've got books on OpenGL for that).

Thanks, Graham Reeds.

[laitinen]

I can recommend this book: Programming Windows With MFC by Jeff Prosise

Regards,

Laitinen

[grahamr (work)]

I looked at that but unfortunately that one is out of stock in the UK and the cheapest I can get it for is £65 (~$120).

[bderagon]

Do you need a hard copy, or will a PDF/chm file work?

[grahamr (work)]

I'd prefer a hard copy. While I'm not adverse to the odd illegal pdf/chm so I can read a few chapters and see if I like it there is something reassuring about a bit of processed wood sat on the desk next to you.

[kirants]

I really need a book on the nuts and bolts of MFC

and

something that goes into handling bitmaps and the like but not into 3D graphics

The 2 are kind of different or at least they sound like 2 different things to me.

If you are talking about nuts and bolts of MFC, I would think more on the lines of the framework aspects ( like class hierarchy, doc-view architecture, CWinApp fundamentals, command routing , message maps etc. ). If indeed that is what you want, I would recommend MFC Internals

If you are looking for GDI stuff, MFC doesn't bring anything much in that except providing wrapper classes around the Win32 APIs to wrap GDI objects. MFC does provide a framework for handling printing etc. though.

So, I would say, for core GDI stuff, referring to a book on MFC doesn't give you much at all.

Out of curiosity, any reason you wouldn't want to use GDI+ ?

[Igor Vartanov]

Recently I've been working with images and Device Contexts - something I've never really done much of in the past. So I've decided to purchase a book on the subject.

I was going to order Charles Petzold's book, but I was wondering if anyone else had any recommendations. I really need a book on the nuts and bolts of MFC, something that goes into handling bitmaps and the like but not into 3D graphics (I've got books on OpenGL for that).

Thanks, Graham Reeds.

Typical beginner's mistake - taking MFC as panacea.
And you know what? These highlighted two have nothing common.
MFC is just an object-oriented framework, very-very thin for wrapping WinAPI, noticeably thicker in COM/ActiveX stuff and very thick about document-view paradigm support. So you have a good chance to be drown in depth of "nuts and bolts of MFC" rather than scrape a very few of "handling bitmaps and the like"

To really learn "handling bitmaps and the like" I would recommend Feng Yuan's Windows Graphics Programming: Win32 GDI and DirectDraw - the must-read one for GUI programmer.

Don't be misguided by mentioning DirectDraw - the book is 95% about low-level GDI stuff.

[Igor Vartanov]

BTW, this also looks promising, though I never read it.

[fred100]

I really need a book on the nuts and bolts of MFC, something that goes into handling bitmaps

MFC are useless.
Books are useless to "handling bitmaps".
Everything is in MSDN.

[Paul McKenzie]

To really learn "handling bitmaps and the like" I would recommend Feng Yuan's Windows Graphics Programming: Win32 GDI and DirectDraw - the must-read one for GUI programmer.

Feng used to post here a while ago. I wondered where he went to.

Regards,

Paul McKenzie

[grahamr (work)]

Out of curiosity, any reason you wouldn't want to use GDI+ ?

Because I have taken over the maintenance of a large app (a port of a mid-1990 dos product) and most of it is already written.

Also I don't need to do a lot besides show a few bitmaps here/there and a few LlineTo(). What I remember from my very brief exposure to GDI+ was lot's of paths and stuff.

[grahamr (work)]

To really learn "handling bitmaps and the like" I would recommend Feng Yuan's Windows Graphics Programming: Win32 GDI and DirectDraw - the must-read one for GUI programmer.

I saw that. Out of print too and £75 for copy. I visited his site when I was trying to get monochrome transparency working (still not working, but that is another thread).

[grahamr (work)]

MFC are useless.
Books are useless to "handling bitmaps".
Everything is in MSDN.

Yes, but the MFC is quite terse at times, more so than your comment.

[Igor Vartanov]

I saw that. Out of print too and £75 for copy. I visited his site when I was trying to get monochrome transparency working (still not working, but that is another thread).

Well, you would understand that any book cannot cover all thinkable aspects of the topic. So you have to decide what you need - either basics explained or specific problem solved. The book is definitely not a cook-book.

But if you prefer cut expenses, read MSDN.