Book review: Instant Windows 8 C++ Application Development How-to - Packt Publishing

I have recently been sent a couple of ebooks to review. It seems people at Packt Publishing think that I’d be a good person to review their C++ books… Anyway, bear in mind that this ebook was given to me for free and that I was asked to review it…

Instant Windows 8 C++ Application Development How-to is a short book, but then that’s what the “Instant” range of books are supposed to be. I guess the idea is to get people quickly up to speed on a subject. The book does that, but, it contains too much code (which, lets face it, we’re not going to type in and it’s available for download). The code also isn’t really referenced in the descriptive part of the text, certainly not enough to warrant its presence in the book. There’s also a little too much explanation of how to use Visual Studio. This means that the meat of the book tends to be the very brief “How it works” paragraphs at the end of each chapter.

Whilst the book did walk me through the writing of a couple of simple Windows App Store applications I feel I learnt far less that I would have if I had simply typed “writing your first windows 8 store app C++” into Google and followed the first link or second links to the MSDN articles.

Even at 3.99 GBP for the ebook I can’t really recommend it. There’s too much padding and not enough meat and it doesn’t add anything over what I could easily find on Microsoft’s developer site.