Best book to program in Windows?

Clarifications

hDC's are an advanced topic, though not complicated. I cannot personally recommend a book cause I learned that crap through trial and error.

the hDC is the Window ID. the lpsz I think is just the long pointer for a paramater.

I have usually only used these with sendmessage and postmessage commands, in conjunction with findwindow and findwindowex.

So like, to close internet explorer, you would do something like this

const WM_Close as long = {Some hex value, I forget}

dim hdc as long

hdc=findwindow("IEWindowClassName","Windows Explorer 8")

call sendmessage(hdc,WM_Close)

I wrote this in VB6 code cause I am more familure with it, the syntax for C++ is nearly identical.

you want a windows API book, most of the examples will be in C/C++ , though more modern ones might go from .Net.

It's more of a cookbook angle than anything else though. You need to pick something to do first, windows is too big to fit in one book to that level of detail.

and as much as they are prepared to say. There are windows secrets book, basically undocumented features. But if you use them there's even less guarantee than usual that they will keep working.

Please specify what kind of prgramming for Windows you want to do. For example do you want to do application programming or system programming.