Thread: I need to use process.h

Originally Posted by droid15

i am an advanced programmer

Sorry to burst your bubble, but you are a beginner programmer.
An "advanced programmer" (if anyone ever actually fitted such an odd label) would not ask such a question.
One of the most important software development skills is knowing how to find information. This seems to be a skill that you have definitely not mastered.

You can find out how to use any Windows API function by searching msdn.microsoft.com, and using a search engine to find other examples as needed.

Yeah, I believe that since about Windows 95, the documentation has basically been "use MSDN" because it's just too much to document in any other way. And it's not useful to just have a list of millions of functions and their parameters because, for the most part, most programmers will never touch them in their lives. Seriously, how often do you think with the Volume Shadow Copy functionality programmatically? Not often. You won't get examples that show you everything because, for the most part, if you're tinkering with this stuff you shouldn't NEED an example of how to put data into a structure and pass it to a function.

Hell, I spent three hours reading the documentation on how to make a Windows resource file and all I wanted was a handful of lines out of it. It was just easier to find examples elsewhere and then tweak as necessary (how many people put an English (UK) set of resource statements into their Windows executable? Next-to-zero, but a few examples and I had it done).

Complete references aren't going to exist offline. I doubt you *could* publish them, at any sensible price. And they would just be exactly what was linked to - an API description of each function that probably doesn't describe 1% of the usage or known-bugs concerning that particular function (or even 80% of the functions Windows actually uses). Just what would be the point in publishing that if, as linked, it's all online and you'll never use 1% of it?

The last thing I ever used that was documented even as far as publishing an API like that in a book were probably the early Java's. Literally 50% of the O'Reilly book was a copy of the Java API. It didn't even try to do documentation of the Java VM or anything else, and is so out of date now as to be useless. But the fact was I never used it, I just learned Java and then the occasional "odd" function that I needed to use, I looked up online (which was always more up-to-date and relevant and had more examples and, most importantly, could be copy-pasted so I didn't have to type it out perfectly).

Similarly, there's no "complete" published reference of the Linux userspace API, or the glibc API, or any of the other things you mentioned. If you're lucky a small library might post some Javadoc pages which are automatically generated from the code and comments. That's about as good as you get, because delving into individual files could take forever to describe loosely, let alone document properly. My latest project is some 20,000+ lines of C code that use everything from SDL to OpenGL to OpenSSL to SQLite (and a dozen other libraries besides), works on Linux, MacOS and Windows and compiles natively to their executables. How many textbooks did I reference? Zero. How many of those libraries do I know "off by heart"? Zero. How many of those libraries and API's had I used before? Less than half (e.g. the Windows resource file thing). You find an example of what you want to do, that gives you a hint at what functions do it, you read the latest API description of those functions and their associated structures and you join-the-dots to get a working program.

Hell, if you think the Windows API is a mess, go find OpenSSL documentation that you can use. I dare you.