Old New Thing

The Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows

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Raymond Chen: Old New Thing (2006, Addison Wesley)

512 pages

English language

Published Jan. 25, 2006 by Addison Wesley.

ISBN:
978-0-13-270164-8
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4 stars (2 reviews)

3 editions

Review of 'The old new thing' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

A fascinating insight into the quirks of modern OS development.

The book goes into a fair bit of technical detail, complete with C++, C and assembly source code listings. Unlike a programming textbook, however, Chen's writing is never boring. Interesting and sometimes funny anecdotes are sprinkled throughout, giving context to the issue being discussed.

While naturally focused on MS-DOS and Windows, it still manages to be very interesting for a Unix user and developer like myself, and while some of the intricacies of the Windows API aren't all that useful nor relatable to me, there were only a few places where the discussion was not something any developer could in some way relate to.

For me, this is mostly a fascinating piece of software development history, and one I'd thoroughly recommend anyone interested in such things give a read.

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3 stars