Microsoft Windows is a complex operating system. It offers so many features and does so much that it's impossible for any one person to fully understand the entire system. This complexity also makes it difficult for someone to decide where to start concentrating the learning effort. Well, I always like to start at the lowest level by gaining a solid understanding of the system's basic building blocks. Once you understand the basics, it's easy to incrementally add any higher-level aspects of the system to your knowledge. So this book focuses on Windows' basic building blocks and the fundamental concepts that you must know when architecting and implementing software targeting the Windows operating system. In short, this book teaches the reader about various Windows features and how to access them via the C and C++ programming languages.
Although this book does not cover some Windows concepts—such as the Component Object Model (COM)—COM is built on top of basic building blocks such as processes, threads, memory management, DLLs, thread local storage, Unicode, and so on. If you know these basic building blocks, understanding COM is just a matter of understanding how the building blocks are used. I have great sympathy for people who attempt to jump ahead in learning COM's architecture. They have a long road ahead and are bound to have gaping holes in their knowledge, which is bound to negatively affect their code and their software development schedules.
The Microsoft .NET Framework's common language runtime (CLR) is another technology not specifically addressed in this book. (However, it is addressed in my other book: CLR via C#, Jeffrey Richter, Microsoft Press, 2006). However, the CLR is implemented as a COM object in a dynamic-link library (DLL) that loads in a process and uses threads to execute code that manipulates Unicode strings that are managed in memory. So again, the basic building blocks presented in this book will help developers writing managed code. In addition, by way of the CLR's Platform Invocation (P/Invoke) technology, you can call into the various Windows' APIs presented throughout this book.
So that's what this book is all about: the basic Windows building blocks that every Windows developer (at least in my opinion) should be intimately aware of. As each block is discussed, I also describe how the system uses these blocks and how your own applications can best take advantage of these blocks. In many chapters, I show you how to create building blocks of your own. These building blocks, typically implemented as generic functions or C++ classes, group a set of Windows building blocks together to create a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts.
