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Teach Yourself Visual C++® 5 in 24 Hours

Mickey Williams

Dedication

For René, Alex, and Mackenzie.

Acknowledgments

As usual, a large number of people deserve my thanks for the help they provided me for the past few months.

First of all, thanks to all the people at Sams Publishing, especially Brad Jones and my acquisitions editor, Matt Purcell. Thanks also to Chris Nelson, my development editor, who gave me great advice about the book's contents; to Erik Dafforn, Tonya Simpson, and Kate Givens, who did fantastic jobs of editing my manuscript. Finally, thanks to Greg Guntle, who provided me with a great technical review and helped out during author review.

I'd also like to thank Bob O'Brien and all the folks at NuMega Technologies for their help.

Last, but certainly not least, thanks to my wife, René. A wonderful wife, mother, and friend, she is much more patient than any author, especially me, deserves.

About the Author

Mickey Williams is the author of Sams Publishing's Develop a Professional Visual C++ Application in 21 Days and Essential Visual C++ 4 and the co-author of Programming Windows NT Unleashed. Mickey is a member of the ACM and IEEE Computer Society and the founder of Codev Technologies, a consulting and training company that specializes in 32-bit Windows development.

Tell Us What You Think!

As a reader, you are the most important critic and commentator of our books. We value your opinion and want to know what we're doing right, what we could do better, what areas you'd like to see us publish in, and any other words of wisdom you're willing to pass our way. You can help us make strong books that meet your needs and give you the computer guidance you require.

Do you have access to the World Wide Web? Then check out our site at http://www.mcp.com.


NOTE: If you have a technical question about this book, call the technical support line at 317-581-3833 or send email to support@mcp.com.

As the team leader of the group that created this book, I welcome your comments. You can fax, e-mail, or write me directly to let me know what you did or didn't like about this book--as well as what we can do to make our books stronger. Here's the information: Fax: 317-817-7070

E-Mail: bjones@mcp.com
Mail: Brad Jones
Comments Department
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Introduction

This book is written for programmers, beginning or experienced, who are new to Visual C++ and want to develop programs using Visual C++ 5. This book is a no-nonsense guide to programming for Windows, using plenty of short concise examples, without a lot of extraneous material or theory. Each hour includes short examples that illustrate how a different topic can be put to use. In most cases, the examples are limited to about one page of source code per chapter. This allows you to cover a great deal of material easily, even if you're not an expert typist.

What's New in Visual C++ 5.0?

Visual C++ 5.0 offers many new features and improvements over its predecessor, Visual C++ 4.0. Following is a summary of the new features that are covered in this book:

How This Book Is Structured

This book is divided into six sections, each of which focuses on a different aspect of using Visual C++:

Each chapter in the book is designed to take you about an hour to complete. The chapter begins with a list of teaching objectives and then dives right in to the first topic. In each hour, discussions are intertwined with hands-on examples that show you real-world applications for the lessons that you're learning. The end of the hour contains a Q&A section, a quiz, and exercises that are designed to test your knowledge and understanding of the hour's material. The answers to the quiz and exercises are found in Appendix F, "Answers."

What You'll Need

This book does not assume that you have any experience with the C or C++ programming languages, although some programming experience will be helpful. The first section of the book covers many basic parts of the C++ programming language, and other parts of the book discuss C++ language concepts as they are introduced.

The Visual C++ compiler comes in three different versions: the Learning Edition, the Professional Edition, and the Enterprise Edition. You can use this book with any version of the compiler.

To use the Visual C++ compiler, you'll need to use Windows 95 or Windows NT 3.51 or later. You'll also need at least 20MB of memory (24MB on Windows NT) and at least 50MB of disk space, although some installation options require up to 500MB of disk storage. Like most Windows programs, Visual C++ will benefit from adding more memory; most serious programmers use 64MB of RAM or more.

That's all you'll need to get started. Now it's time to turn to Hour 1 for an introduction to the Visual C++ development system.


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