Charles Petzold on book publishing and PC Magazine

There's an interesting interview with Charles Petzold up on the DotNetRocks site (audio stream:  https://perseus.franklins.net//DotNetRocks_0077_Charles_Petzold.asx)

Charles covers a variety of topics, but especially interesting to me was his own struggles with book publishers (e.g., lack of promotion, Right of first refusal, etc...) Also interesting was Charles's comments on the glory days of PC Magazine with people like Jeff Prosise and Doug Boling. I was lucky enough to catch the end of that era. Plus, he's got some good insights on DOS TSRs, and why people were ready for Windows.

I feel old... :-)

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 25, 2004
  I have always like Petzold's Windows Programming (several editions), but somehow couldnt appreciate his C#. Personally I liked Chris Sells's Book. I still do pure Win32 Programming every now and then and have Petzold's book on my desk, along with Douglas Bouling's. The interview is filled with interesting anecdotes. Although there are things I disagree with. For instance Charles downplays MFC. I think without MFC it wouldnt have been possible (until .NET came into picture) to develop decent GUI applications in a short time. Somehow C doesnt suit well for GUI based development. Too many callbacks and long switch statements. I agree MFC wasnt perfect but C++ was not where it is today when MFC began (for instance there were no templates to make use of it like WTL).