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Comment by timthorn | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

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.

“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.

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...

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.

Apologies, I wasn’t familiar with his work.

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.

The MF what?

Classes. MF classes.

That stuff will never wash out of my mind.

Pascal, C, or C++, it depends what mood they were in.

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