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Dan Appleman’s Win32 API Puzzle Book and Tutorial for Visual Basic Programmers Dan Appleman has written several books on the Win32 API and they are very detailed and very helpful. His new book Dan Appleman’s Win32 API Puzzle Book and Tutorial for Visual Basic Programmers (Apress ISBN 1-893115-01-1 www.apress.com) teaches you about programming the Win32 API using puzzles rather than just throwing a ton of technical information at you. It’s a good idea to have his other book on hand when solving the puzzles in this book Dan Appleman’s Programmer’s Guide to the Win32 API (SAMS ISBN 0-672-31590-4). The book is broken up into 3 sections, Puzzles, Solutions and Tutorials. The Tutorials section can help you solve the puzzles, but you can always cheat and head straight to the Solutions section to get the answer. There a total of 32 puzzles to solve in the book and they deal with graphics drawing, the system registry, mapping drives and file operations as well as some other items. The puzzles are helpful in the sense that they help build upon your problem solving skills as a programmer. There are usually many solutions to the same problem and solving more problems helps build experience. You don’t have to be a Visual Basic programmer to get something out of the book. However, it does specifically cover how to code the solutions in VB. The book helps you to understand how to interpret the Win32 API documentation and apply it to VB. He covers particulars such as pre-initializing data strings for return values to declare memory space so memory doesn’t get corrupted when returning data from an API call. Of important note at the beginning of the book is Dan’s "Ten Commandments for Safe API Programming". The book comes with a CD-ROM containing VB example projects on it. So if you’re looking for a challenge at building upon your programming skills with the Win32 API, this book may be worth looking at. If you need a good technical reference and more detailed information on using the Win32 API then take a look at Dan’s other book mentioned above. I use it as a reference bible to the Win32 API all the time.Rich Simpson is president of Mind’s Eye, Inc., a software development and IT consulting firm. He has a degree in aerospace engineering and has been designing and developing custom and commercial database applications since 1986. For more information or to download software demos visit their web site at http://www.mindseyeinc.com or send e-mail to rsimpson@mindseyeinc.com or call 636-282-2102.
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