Bob Swart is a professional systems developer for Bolesian BV in The Netherlands using Borland C++ and Delphi. In his spare time he likes to watch video tapes with his little baby son Erik Mark Pascal.
Uninterrupted Interrupts is the name not of a book, but a CD-ROM with instant information on over 8,000 interrupts. Probably almost everyone knows of the interrupt list from Ralf Brown, or of the books PC Interrupts and Network Interrupts that Ralf and Jim wrote together. This CD-ROM collects all this information and more, and gives the reader fast electronic access to them. In fact, this CD-ROM contains not only all information from PC Interrupts (second edition) and Network Interrupts, but 700 new interrupts that have been added to the master list since publication of these books. This includes information to all BIOS, DOS, Network API and possible third-party interrupts (e.g., Desqview interrupts and Windows' multiplex interrupt).
The CD-ROM uses version 2.0 of the Microsoft Multimedia Viewer — much like the interface used for the MSDN CDs (see screen shot in Figure 1) . You can browse the information in a variety of ways: either by a master index (as used in the both books), by specifying search categories, or by searching for words and phrases. The numerous hyperlinks throughout the text greatly simplify jumps to cross-referenced material, such as from int 10h to 21h.
Even if you already have the two books, you'll find that this CD-ROM still has a lot to offer to you. For starters, you can copy and paste any reference material you like into your programs.
On the downside, if you use the hypertext search engine, you must learn how to specify the words you're looking for. Simply searching for "int 21h" does not have the required effect; you must search for the phrase "int NEAR 21h" to specify that "int" and "21h" should be within a range of eight words, otherwise you'll get all topics that include "int" and "21h" but not necessarily together. I found this a major pain in the first days of using this CD-ROM. Of course, it's not really a fault of the contents as much as my inexperience with the Multimedia Viewer. After a few weeks using the viewer has become quite natural, in fact.
I can recommend this CD-ROM to anyone who ever needs to reference actual DOS, Windows, Network, or other interrups, both for reference or usage. In fact, I use the information on the CD-ROM to document my own interrupt calls!. If you've got one of the books that were used to create the CD-ROM you'll have a pretty good idea of what you can find.
The minimum requirements are a 80386-SX with 4 MB RAM. In practice, however, I've found 8 MB to be more satisfactory (as is a 66Mhz 80486). Of course, Windows 3.1, VGA, a mouse and CD-ROM drive are also needed.
Title: Uninterrupted Interrupts
Authors: Ralf Brown & Jim Kyle
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Price: US$ $49.95 (CD-ROM only)
ISBN: 0-201-40966-6