During the past two years, the new OS/2 IBM operating system has been gaining steady acceptance as a stable and reliable operating platform. This trend is likely to continue in view of the disappointing performance of the much-heralded Microsoft Windows NT. The OS/2 equivalent to Windows is Presentation Manager and, like Windows, it presents programming difficulties.

This new book takes a leisurely conducted tour through some of the major problems, such as the construction of dialogue boxes in a window, multicolumn tabulation, initialization, and file security. It consists of 15 chapters, two appendices, and a good index. No references are provided.

The first two chapters describe the transition to 32-bit programming and the general details of window processing. They are followed by two versions of a sample program to generate a window and to use it to call a DOS application.

Chapters 4 to 7 discuss aspects of creating and using dialogue boxes, again with extensive C++ code examples. The next section of the book shows how to manipulate icons, and illuminates window enumeration or the derivation of child-process handles. This leads naturally to the important topic of threads, multitasking, and how to shut down processes and the system gracefully.

The final chapter describes an exception handler and gives sample code. The two appendices are a good glossary of technical terms and a short description of how to obtain the code on disk.

This very readable book contains lots of clearly documented and useful code examples. It could be used in an advanced programming class but is probably most useful as a reference for working OS/2 programmers.