Hardcopy is a little easier on the eyes and I grew up with books.

Caution: This reference set seems like 12 books crammed into 5 without the consideration of reformatting. The pages aren't numberered the way one would expect. One book ends and another begins without warning, beining at page one. The index for each "Section" is at the end and corresponds to it,s section. Example: There are three pages numbered one.

"Believe me: You don't need this!", All information you need is already there, in MSDN. It's not worth to have all those pages printed. I have bought this reference thinking it was different from current documentation attached to Visual C++, but it is the SAME.

This is fairly useless, unless you want to loose time and money.

"Best MFC Classes Documentations", Did you ever got frustrated from programming Windows application because you couldn't find the documentation when needed the most? Be honest now, can you really say the MSDN cds are all you need to give you adequate documentation to get by MFC? Maybe so, but you are probably doing it the hard way.

Let me let you in a trick that I learn from Windows programming that can help you become more efficient in MFC. Place the volume 1 & 2 of this reference set beside your computer on the angle desk. Yup, believe it or not, this essentially give you about 3000 pages of well indexed references to all of MFC classes from A - Z. And do your self a favour, bookmark the section to CWnd and CDC clases for quick access to the core of Windows programming. With these books and the MSDN library, that's enough to make you very dangerous.

"Review For Volume 4: Run-Time Library Reference", This is the first book I read out of the volume set (5 books total), and why? Because it is an excellent, and well indexed resource on C/C++ reference. Here, let me give you a quick run down on a few items that this volume has.

1) Buffer Manipulation and Memory Allocation. (can be useful when working with array).

2) Data Conversion core subroutines. (they are like the abc of programming if you ask me.)

3) Directory and file Handling routines. (quick solution to Windows directory)

4) Stream I/O and low I/O. (very detailed topic on stream)

5) Searching and Sorting. (qsort, bsearch, ...there if you needed)

6) String Manipulation. (very, very complete listing of string functions)

7) Time Managment routines. (you will use these guys sooner or later)

If you looking for a C/C++ reference, I highly recommend this volume. I can't recommend the entire set because I haven't finish reading them yet. Anyway, I hope this help.

"Don't Try Visual C++ Without It!", As stated in other reviews, the information in this 5 volume set is the same as what is found on the MSDN CDs, but it is at least 10 times easier finding information in the book(s). I am new to c++, and was getting discouraged because it was so difficult to find what I needed. Since I got this set, I can do in a week what used to take 4-6 weeks without it. If you want to code with Visual C++, its a no brainer, you need it.