hugo landsman wrote in a message to Jonathan Tew:

 hl> "Orfali & Harkey" (both titles, if I remember correct),
 hl> "Blain et al" and "Mastrianni" did get good
reviews in this
 hl> echo.

I would agree about Orfaly & Harkey, and about Blain et al.

However, I would not recommend Mastrianni; I think the book is largely
incomprehensible, except for the half of it which simply restates the
official IBM docs.  Mastrianni has what I consider to be serious quirks,
not the least of which is making up his own names for the DevHelp API and
then trying to sell a library that supports his naming convention for
calling the DevHelp API from C -- when IBM provides, at no additional cost,
their own DHCALLS.LIB as part of the DDK.

Mastrianni also decides to do things in ways directly opposite to the IBM
docs for no particular reason that I can understand.  For example,
Mastrianni says that DevHelp_VerifyAccess should be called before
DevHelp_Lock, while IBM says to call DevHelp_Lock before calling
DevHelp_VerifyAccess.  Using Mastrianni's method will cause a pointer error
in the application to pull Trap D, and will also run the risk of verifying
a selector that gets swapped out between the call to DevHelp_VerifyAccess
and the call to DevHelp_Lock.  The only reasonable interpretation is that
Mastrianni is clearly wrong, but he takes pains to emphasize that he really
does mean to contradict the IBM docs.
 
-- Mike


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