Windows 95 Multimedia & Odbc Api Bible

Including all the tools a programmer needs to control MIDI devices, play sound, show movies, and control input devices, this volume explains how to create programs that communicate through e-mail, modems, and PBX systems. Examples and explanations, along with a CD of sample code, cover five major areas of programming--ODBC2, MAPI, TAPI, and multimedia and communication APIs.

Multimedia & ODBC API Bible explores four generally unrelated topics in its pages: ODBC (Open Database Connectivity), the Telephony API (application programming interface), Common Messaging Calls (CMC), and multimedia API. Each API element gets a one- to three-page explanation of its arguments, return values and syntax; some elements also get illustrative source code and comments.

The ODBC section details the ODBC 2.5 API, which is only one step behind the current ODBC 3.0 release. Individual chapters contain the calls that have to do with certain types of database procedures, such as connecting to a data source and working with result sets. The Telephony API portion of this book does much the same thing, splitting the telephony function into line devices and phone devices, then describing API elements in each piece. The Common Messaging Calls, a part of MAPI (messaging application programming interface), are fully documented. Multimedia API documentation gets broken down by functional area, with chapters on MIDI, Media Control Interface (MCI), AVI (Audio Video Interleaved) file I/O, joysticks, and other elements. Of the four topics covered in this book, multimedia gets the most thorough coverage, with the best source code and the clearest prose.

Multimedia & ODBC API Bible takes on too much and only does a good job with some of its chosen material. If you're looking for decent multimedia API documentation, this book has good information on Telephony API, which isn't commonplace; however, you should consider supplementing the rest of the sections with other resources.