The graphical user interface is touted as the next step in improved computer productivity. This book deals with the Presentation Manager (PM) as implemented in OS/2 from Microsoft or IBM. The goal of the book, as Southerton states in his introduction, is “to provide introductory material and examples, so you can begin programming the Presentation Manager, and…to serve as a reference once you have become familiar with the Presentation Manager.”

For someone who expects to use Presentation Manager through applications developed by others, the first chapter and perhaps a scanning of the second are about as much of the book as will be needed. Having encountered a PM application that does not implement the standard accelerator keys, I hope that those who will implement commercial PM applications read this book.

A synopsis of the first two chapters will give you a reasonable idea of what this book is about. Chapter 1, “From the Outside In,” describes Presentation Manager from the user’s viewpoint. Microsoft has published a Presentation Manager application style guide, which is a key to attaining one of the advertised advantages of PM applications, namely the transferability of “how to use” knowledge. The chapter describes keyboard and mouse alternatives to application control, mouse pointers, icons (shrunken windows) and windows of many types, the desktop (where windows reside), and dialogue boxes.

Chapter 2, “From the Inside Out,” introduces PM and OS/2 concepts for which the remainder of the book provides a lot of detail. These topics include messages, creating and managing windows, menus, control windows, dialogue boxes, graphics and bitmapped resources, fonts, the input focus and the keyboard, mice and pointers, hooks and help, and the clipboard.

Anyone who ventures beyond the introductory material needs at least a reading knowledge of the C programming language. Much of the book reads like a programmer’s reference to PM, which is the author’s second objective. For someone who does not care about how a PM application interfaces to OS/2, most of the book will be dull reading.