I am an adequate C and C++ programmer working to improve some of my skills and I wanted to play around with some simple game development and GUI design work. I found this board and read one of the tutorials on creating a window, which I was finally able to do using VC++ 6.0. This was rather unintuitive kind of stuff and I was wondering if anyone could give me some suggestions for books on Win32 development using the structures that were used in the tutorial. I have seen some books out there on game development and 3D design but they are a little to far beyond the point and only gloss over the window creation and manipulation thru menus and such. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance, S

The simplest, most straitforward, book I''ve found on Win32 programming basics is:

"Windows 98 Programming From the Ground Up", by Herbert Schildt

There are NT variants of this and maybe Windows ME or 2000 versions ... but 98 is probably the best because the API is the same as 95 ... just pure Win32 ... but the book is more accurate than any of the 95 programming books I''ve seen (they were all released right when Win32 came out).

This book is great for 3 reasons:
1. Schildts easy to read and informative writing style.
2. The early chapters which explain the basic Win32 API framework right up front ... including differences with the older 16 bit windows (which you don''t need to know ... but hearing a contrast helps you understand the purpose of a system).
3. The clear presentation of a simple Skeleton program (nearly the minimum needed to get a GUI up), and then a step by step addition of other features (many of which game developers don''t use).