I'll attempt to give proper remarks for this book later, but suffice to say this book is well worth your time if you're learning C++. I like how Francis pays particular attention to the pitfalls of the language. He teaches you to always check for failing function calls (something a lot of “beginner books” fail to do) and teaches you how to use strings and vectors from the beginning in place of arrays.

If you're like me and checked this out from the library you probably did not get a copy of the cd. I visited the website and downloaded the material from there. What didn't work for me was the link to Quincy 2002.

Instead I visited Google and searched for it. I found that Quincy 2005 was available so I grabbed that.

Thankfully Francis made the source for the graphics library used in the book available so it could be compiled for the version of Mingw included by Quincy 2005 (v1.3 is what I used).

1. Download Quincy 2005 v1.3 (or similar, but be advised that you may have to modify these directions a little) and install it.
2. Download all archives from the book's website (resources link).
3. Run tutorial.exe, extract to the folder where the tutorial already resides. It should create a folder called tutorial. For the rest of the directions I'll refer to this folder as the tutorial folder. I'll pretend it's located at C:\Documents and Settings\Bob\Desktop\ycdi_files
4. Open the tutorial folder and look for a fgw_headers folder.
5. Copy C:\Program Files\quincy\mingw\lib\COMPLETE_THIS_PATH\libgdi32.a and replace the libgdi32.a file within the fgw_headers folder.
6. Extract fgwlib.zip and copy the updated fgw_text.h header file to fgw_headers. Choose to overwrite the older file.
7. Extract library_source.zip. This should give you a folder called source4net.
8. Open a command prompt (Start→Run→cmd→Enter)
9. type:

   set path=%path%;C:\Program Files\quincy\mingw\bin

   

10. type:

    cd C:\Documents and Settings\Bob\Desktop\ycdi_files\source4net

11. type:

    make

12. Copy libfgwz.a to fgw_headers
13. Delete fgwlib.a so there is no confusion which file to add to your projects.
14. Every time the book tells you to add fgwlib.a to your project, add your newly compiled libfgwz.a instead.