This is one of those books that had I seen it in a bookshop I would have flicked through and rejected almost immediately. I hate, I mean really hate books laid out in this style, the overuse of headings, (and the ridiculously large font used for most of them), tables where the rows alternate between grey and white backgrounds and grey backgrounds for all the code (as I find that black text on dark grey really is not pleasant to view).

I did agree the review the book, so despite all this I made the effort to suffer through it and read the book. I am very glad I did, after about 100 pages it quickly became apparent that this was going to be a very useful book to have around, in fact it's now my primary MFC/Windows programming reference book. It actually does tell you how to use almost all of the MFC classes with good and relevant examples, but not just that it explains how things work and relate to the rest of the classes (in some case the original non OO API too) and often why certain things work the way they do. I highly recommend it (ignoring the layout), especially as it is cheaper than most other similar books.