development

This book provides a thorough treatment of system programming principles for Microsoft Operating Systems. The author has a concise, to-the-point writing style and he covers the majority of relevant topics. The text also contains a number of useful and imaginative examples of the Windows programming interface. I liked the revised multithreading sections, which contain a lot of interesting new material (especially for readers with UNIX experience). Win32 System Programming is a manageable and useful reference guide.

This book, together with the reference documentation, should get any programmer started with Win32 system programming. There are plenty of comparisons with Unix and this can be very useful for anyone with that background. It is up to date and covers Windows 2000 and give you hints how to prepare for Win64. Especially it covers asynchronous I/O and threads in a good way. The last chapter gives an overview of RPC and COM, but anyone really interested in this probably needs another book.

I recommend this the book to all experienced programmers interested in learning the Win32 API. It covers all the core system services that you need to learn first. If you need to tackle the GUI you can try 'Programming Windows' by Petzold. Of course I'd suggest that you go the .NET route or get a good toolkit (not MFC) instead. If you want to move on to more advanced Win32 programming try 'Programming Applications for Microsoft Windows' (if you can find a copy). To get into deeper system programming, you'll have to move on to the Undocumented/Native API books.