Reviews for O'Leary Series: Microsoft Windows 2000 Brief Edition

The average rating for O'Leary Series: Microsoft Windows 2000 Brief Edition based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-05-10 00:00:00 Deanna Sterling Solid, up-to-date (through kernel 6.0 build 6001 AKA Windows Server 2008) coverage of the Windows Base Systems API, clearly designed for the programmer who has been rocking UNIX coast-to-coast for a decade, and now finds himself required to deliver product to a Windows audience. One might not think this a major demographic, but the path seems thus: (1) Promising computer scientists are attracted to UNIX in their youth due to its power, sanity, and elitism. (2) Said programmers get into systems programming, because it's (a) the natural domain of badasses and (b) the dominant genre of UNIX code jobs. (3) Enabled by the power of open source and the UNIX programming environment, they become the dominant programmers of their generations. (4) PROFIT (in what other industries, save finance, can you easily make six figures at twenty?) (5) They develop social consciences, and leave the server room to code for public consumption, Vanguard accounts fattened like Arctic seals. (6) Public consumption means dealing with Redmond. Thus, there's likely plenty of space for a serious, focused book guiding the experienced UNIX systems programmer through Windows, explaining things in idioms familiar to UNIX hackers. Frequent reference is made to Stevens+Rago's essential Second Edition of Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, and indeed this book might be largely unintelligible without having read that tome. One comes away with rather deep respect, I must admit, for the Win64 API and where it's come. In several areas (the fibre formalism of user-scheduled threads/coroutines, the standardized approach to arena allocators (most unfortunately named "heaps"), the promotion of PIDs within the API from numerics to capabilities, etc), it's well ahead of what's available on a standard Linux/FreeBSD deployment (Solaris hackers may feel justified in cackling at this point). For first-timers, I'd recomment APIUEe2, followed only then by this book. --- ...and a chill filled the room...

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-18 00:00:00 Jessica Kaplan A good reference covering Windows systems programming constructs and mechanisms, including those newly introduced in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 (e.g. slim readers/writers locks, condition variables).