Thread: WinAPI ?

Well the book is probably referring to GDI. This is the windows graphical device interface. Windows applications usually don't relate with the hardware drivers directly instead they communicate through GDI which in turn communicates to the drivers. Do a search on it or look at the msdn webpage.

http://msdn.microsoft.com

oh, thanx. now I need some suggestion. I'm not so good in C++ and always learning it console based. should I learn APIs when learning C++ or after some months(maybe years) later ?

You can get a long way with c/c++ with a console. You should IMHO stick with console programming until you are fully comfortable with the syntax and structure of c++ and STL. After learning that I would spend some time learning about the win32 api. When you have some win32 knowledge and can make a window and write a message pump etc. then maybe think about looking at OpenGL. If DirectX interests you then you could learn that too but you would want to be a little more comfortable with the bare api first for that.

Well, if you're getting impatient, go ahead with GDI. But if you ever need to learn something new or test something relatively simmple, create a skeleton console app and do your testing with that instead. (i.e. if you want to test with file i/o, create a console app that opens a file, reads it, outputs it to something else, and closes the file,and quits)

Once you're done testing/learning, go back and use your new knowledge in the current app.

thanx guys~

I'll stick to console for months and see how much I will acquire.