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Comment by timthorn

9 days ago

> click on the “books” tab - the author is a technologist

That's rather underselling him. Charles Petzold wrote the canonical reference works for programming Win32 and MFC.

It's like calling Donald Knuth a lecturer.

19 comments

timthorn

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jrmg  8 days ago

His book ‘Code’ is his masterpiece, IMO.

It’s a tour de force in technical communication. A fascinating book for both the Computer Science novice and expert.

OJFord  9 days ago

His 'Annotated Turing' (a reproduction of On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, with explanation and walk-through) got me into CS vs. prior interest mainly in EE.

tambourine_man  8 days ago

“Code” is one of the best books I’ve ever read. I don’t usually read 500 page books but this one flew. Even if you know most of what’s being discussed it’s such a delightful ride.

rrr_oh_man  9 days ago

For the curious:

> Microsoft provides two frameworks for developing Windows applications: MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) and Win32. MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) is a Microsoft framework for developing Windows applications in the C++ programming language. Win32 is a collection of functions and data structures provided by Microsoft for the development of Windows applications. [0]

[0] https://www.tutorialspoint.com/article/difference-between-mf...

  • okanat  8 days ago

    That's old info. Now there is also .NET Framework, .NET (Core), C++/WinRT and more. In the end all of them use either pure Win32 APIs or COM APIs including MFC.

sd9  9 days ago

Apologies, I wasn’t familiar with his work.

  • sutterd  8 days ago

    I was surprised to see a post by Petzold on this subject. I know who he is. But I don’t think you owe an apology here. I think you made a thoughtful comment. A post like his should be critiqued for what it says, not for the author’s previous work. And, fortunately, other people could give context on the significant work he has done.