When I first broke into computing, programming was what one did with computers. It was the mid 1980's and the market was flooded with cheap home computers, from the Adam (by Coleco) to the ZX81 (from Sinclair). Programming books were targeted at the hobbyist, and the authorial tone was like having it all explained to you over coffee in your living room. Then came the IBM PC and Jeff Duntemann's Complete Turbo Pascal to teach us how to hack on this new generation of hardware. That book was very possibly the last of its kind. As the target audience for books on programming shifted toward the professional programmer, the books themselves began to take on titles like, "Enterprise Client-Server Development using ODBC." Programming was no longer "Programming" but "Development," and the hobbyist-programmer was abandoned by the computer publishing industry.

I am happy to report that the golden age has returned, and if you can swallow your pride long enough to bring a "for Dummies" book to the counter at your bookstore, you can have Blake Watson's OS/2 Warp Programming for Dummies. The book comes with neither CD nor diskette, but this is hardly a disadvantage since typing in the code gives the reader the opportunity to develop a familiarity with it. Watson's style is affectedly familiar, as if he is all too conscious that he is writing a "Dummies" book, but while it may lack Duntemann's sincerity, it is far clearer and more entertaining than the encyclopedic style of Petzold's Presentation Manager Programming and far more coherent than Real World Programming for OS/2 2.11. It is also up to date for OS/2 Warp, which sets it apart from most of the other books available.

The approach that Watson takes is very solid. He begins with an introduction to the way OS/2 (and incidentally Windows) programs work, which includes one of the most lucid explanations of event driven software I have ever encountered. Then he provides programming examples beginning with how to just get a window on the screen and progresses through the code that needs to be added to make a functional program. With each code example is a talmudic explication of each new function, what its parameters are, and what role it plays in the program. Being more concerned with the "big picture" than with the minutiae of the PM API, Watson also imparts to his reader the skill of parsing the names of the API functions and structures so that by the time one is done reading the book, one should be able to look at an unfamiliar API function and discern what it does.

Do not make the assumption that because this is a "Dummies" book, it is suitable for a rank beginner. In spite of the fact that IDG assigns it a reader level of Beginning to Intermediate, Indelible Blue classifies it as Accomplished/Expert. It assumes that you either have a working knowledge of C or can make the jump from C to whatever language you do use. It will not instruct you in how to use your specific compiler. I am using C SET++, but the examples in the book should also work with Watcom C++ or Turbo C++ for OS/2. The very first code example also contains two bugs: one, a prototype that does not match the function it defines and the second an undefined variable. You must have sufficient knowledge of C to solve these sorts of problems if you are to make proper use of the book.

Overall, this book is an excellent resource for the hobbyist-programmer who wishes to write to the OS/2 PM platform. It is a good starting point for the experienced hobbyist who wants an introduction to event-driven programming in the workplace shell environment. By the time one is done reading it, one should be able to make full use of the Presentation Manager features and should be able to create a multi-threaded application for PM or WPS. It should be noted that the book's focus is on PM Programming and does not discuss OS/2 internals at all. The tone is by and large friendly, albeit self-consciously so, and the technical explanations are clear and reasonably complete. The book's primary drawbacks are the fact that some buggy code has been allowed to slip through the cracks and that its tone is occasionally condescending, and for these reasons, given a 5 star system, this book would get 3 and one half stars.

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