How to learn windows system programming from the scratch?

Question

0.00/5 (No votes)

See more:

I've been learning and practising programming with C/C++ for two years and now I'm pretty good at this. But now I want to learn windows system programming with win32 apis, I've tried some books like Addison_Wesley_Windows_System_Programming and a few others but they didn't work for me as I felt the stuff written inside them was very complicated, high level and hard to understand for beginners as I went through the first chapters. I've spent a lot of time in finding out tutorials and resources online which would be aimed at teaching novices but all efforts seemed to fail and finally I've ended up with despair..!!

If anyone could guide me on how to do this and make my life easy again I would be very grateful...!

Thanx in advance.

What I have tried:

I've tried to go through several windows programming guides, books and some online tutorials like tenouk's win32 tutorial at www.tenouk.com/cnwin32tutorials.html but It felt hard to me as a beginner!

Posted 22-Jul-16 4:06am

Aaditya Vishwakarma

Updated 22-Jul-16 8:22am

v2

Add a Solution

3 solutions

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

Jochen Arndt · Answer 1 · 2016-07-22T04:35:00

Because you want an easy life all I can suggest is avoiding the low level Windows API stuff for the GUI related parts and using a framework like MFC instead. The native API can still be used for non-GUI related tasks.

Using the official documentation for the framework and a good tutorial or book you should then become familar with writing Windows applications.

Afterwards you might have a look at the sources of the framework to see how it uses the API.

In general it is always a time consuming and often hard task to start learning some kind of technology.

I have done it that way (having good knowledge of C/C++ before learning Windows programming using MFC) and it worked for me.

My best wishes for coping the challenge.

Richard MacCutchan · Answer 2 · 2016-07-22T05:05:00

Any Books by Charles Petzold[^], particularly "Programming Windows" will help you learn. However, as Charles quotes in one of his chapters "no one said it was easy". If you really are as you say "pretty good at it" you should find the Win32 API not too difficult to understand. But be prepared to spend quite a lot of time on the studies and the practice, there is no quick and easy shortcut.

Patrice T · Answer 3 · 2016-07-22T08:22:00

Quote:
I felt the stuff written inside them was very complicated, high level and hard to understand for beginners

An OS like windows is very complicated, and it is very hard to understand for beginners.
It is even hard for experimented programmers that have never done system programming.
System level programming is hard because all the stuff that make your like easy at high level programming comes from system level and are not available for building new system features.

How to learn windows system programming from the scratch?

3 solutions

Solution 1

Solution 2

Solution 3

Add your solution here

Preview 0