MFC Programming

Rating:
Summary: Good Book - Better than MS offerings
Review: After making relatively successful forays into MFC armed only with MS reference materials or books written by MS employees and I have finally found a book which explains MFC without marketing it. Very lucid and well-written. I think the Document/View model is a bit less generic and useful than is presented, but at least now I understand most of its underpinnings. One error - Delphi has never been interpreted (p.5);

Rating:
Summary: An excellent first MFC book!
Review: As a 4th year CS BSc student I might claim to be the owner of the greatest number of MFC books. Most are like the curate's egg - good in parts. It is with regret that I came upon Feuer's book so late in the buying sequence. Had I discovered it earlier my bank account would now be better and that of Amazon somewhat less!

My MFC library ranges from the 'Do it in 24 hours' variety (often laughable - but even they often have something to offer) through to MS professional tomes which seem like those job offers where you need not only the ability but a few years experience as well. Another excellent book is Kruglinski but this only proves it's worth once you have nearly got the whole idea well understood. Feuer - much better as a starter - assumes little except a good C++ base and then takes one forward step by step.

I very strongly recommend Feuer for anybody with a good C++ basis wanting to move to VC++ and MFC. This is the one to start with if you want to protect your cash. Kruglinski should come after and then you're ready for the MS serious stuff! Happy coding!

Rating:
Summary: Great Intermediate Book!
Review: Cuts through all the crap and gets to the point! Excellent examples. A real time saver and is a good reference manual. Explains some of the more abstract concepts of MFC. Must have for the Intermediate MFC / Visual C++ 5 Programmer.

Rating:
Summary: Great MFC Book (from what I see so far)!
Review: Have been looking for a MFC book for sometime now, I came across this book, it wasn't as large as most other MFC books but I own many programming books and larger is not always better, most of the time the larger the book the more BS it includes. The book includes "real world" examples like the tree view example isn't just a tree view which includes 1-9 or some other BS it is you local drive structure! I have only been skimming through this book for about an hour and it has already answered about 50% of my questions! If you know C++ and want to learn MFC then this is a great book! It teaches MFC not the C++ language structure or how to use all of the wizards which most MFC books waste the first 3 - 4 chapters on!

Rating:
Summary: good as a second MFC book
Review: I give this book 4 stars instead of 5 because it was published in 1997 and is somewhat outdated now. I purchased it in mid 99 because I liked the other book in the series, Win32 Programming by Brent Rector.

Feuer's book is consise and I like his approach of explaining some of the internals of MFC, such as what BEGIN_MESSAGE_MAP expands out to. Feuer talks about the Win32 API too and I agree with his philosophy that MFC programmers can't hope to get by without knowing anything about the API.

The sample code applications on the CD are great. They are simple to understand, but show you most of the options possible. For example, there is one app that displays all kinds of buttons, including owner drawn ones. Most MFC books don't even say anything about owner draw stuff. At the end of the book, Feuer shows you how to make a wizard-based install program.

I recommend reading this book after you've read a beginner's book on MFC and/or Visual C++. Also, the author does not reproduce all of the sample code in the book itself. You should install the CD and read the actual code as you read the book.

Rating:
Summary: This book is not a waste for MFC programming.
Review: I have not read this book, I have mostly browsed through it to find information that I need. This book has not let me down. I have a variety of programming books, many that were more than twice what this book costs, that don't cover important topics the way this book does.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: I really love this book for its exemplary instructional values. Thanks Alan!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: This book provides a fair introduction to programming with MFC. The text is easy to understand and covers a wide range of topics in a practical way without too much fluff. However, at just over 420 pages this book is comparatively brief with respect to other MFC books which cover the same topics and, subsequently, the material at times suffers from a lack of depth. It's easy for a beginner to lose the "big picture" since the author presents a lot of MFC functions and classes without really explaining where they come from. This would be a good reference for the more experienced programmer, but I wouldn't recommend this book for beginners.

Rating:
Summary: This book is just OK.
Review: This book provides a fair introduction to programming with MFC. The text is easy to understand and covers a wide range of topics in a practical way without too much fluff. However, at just over 420 pages this book is comparatively brief with respect to other MFC books which cover the same topics and, subsequently, the material at times suffers from a lack of depth. It's easy for a beginner to lose the "big picture" since the author presents a lot of MFC functions and classes without really explaining where they come from. This would be a good reference for the more experienced programmer, but I wouldn't recommend this book for beginners.

Rating:
Summary: Does an exceptional job of explaining the "guts" of MFC
Review: This is an outstanding book. If you want to understand what MFC is, how it works and how to get it to work then buy this book. This is a nice complement to a book like "Inside Visual C++". Whereas that book does a great job with the tutorials, this book explains the fundamentals of MFC programming beautifully. MFC Programming has 3 parts. The first explains many of the important MFC classes (mainly wrapper classes) and how they work with Win32. The second part builds on the first to explain the framework aspects of MFC. The third part has 4 complete applications. In the first 2 parts, each chapter generally has an example that is used to demonstrate the points raised in the chapter. There aren't any full listings - just snippets of relevant code. (The executables and .cpp and .h files etc are on the CD-ROM.) This makes it easy to see the relevant points without getting totally lost. Another nice feature that this book has is very good diagrams that explain class relationships, Win32 connections etc. A well written book is one that explains difficult things effortlessly. This is a well written book! (One caveat: The book does not explain the MSFT Visual C++ IDE - there are no IDE "screen shots". Though this book is really meant for intermediate to advanced programmers, after a small MSFT Visual C++ learning curve (check out 1 or 2 of the MSFT tutorials to get up to speed with the IDE), you will be able to understand the concepts in this book well.)