Back in the day (and perhaps still true today), Charles Petzold‘s Programming Windows was the definitive source for learning to program Windows. The book is so old that even I used it to learn Windows programming, back when everything was 16-bit and uphill both ways. The most recent edition is Programming Windows, 5th Edition, which was published way back in 1998. What has he been doing since then? My guess would have been “sitting on a beach in Hawaiʻi,” but apparently he’s been writing books on C# and Windows Forms and WPF and Silverlight. Hey, I could still be right: Maybe he writes the books while sitting on a beach in Hawaiʻi. It appears that Windows 8 has brought Mr. Petzold back to the topic of Windows progarmming, and despite his earlier claims that he has no plans to write a sixth edition of Programming Windows, it turns out that he’s writing a sixth edition of Programming Windows specifically for Windows 8. (Perhaps he could subtitle his book The New Old Thing.) Here’s where it gets interesting. Before the book officially releases (target date November 15), there will be two pre-release versions in eBook form, one based on the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 and one based on the Release Preview. Now it gets really interesting: If you order the Consumer Preview eBook, it comes with free upgrades to the Release Preview eBook as well as the final eBook. (If you order the Release Preview eBook, then it comes with a free upgrade to the final eBook.) Can it get even more interesting than that? You bet! Because the price of getting in on the action increases the longer you wait. Act now, and you can get the Consumer Preview eBook (and all the free upgrades that come with it) for just $10. Wait a few weeks, and it’ll cost you $20. Wait another few months, and it’ll cost you $30; after another few weeks the price goes up to $40, and if you are a lazy bum and wait until the final eBook to be released, it’ll cost you $50. But in order to take advantage of this offer, you have to follow the instructions on this blog entry from Microsoft Press (and read the mandatory legal mumbo-jumbo, because the lawyers always get their say). Bonus chatter: One publisher asked me if I wanted to write a book on programming Windows 8, but I told them that I was too busy shipping Windows 8 to have any extra time to write a book about it. And it’s a good thing I turned them down, because imagine if I decided to write the book and found that Charles Petzold was coming out of retirement to write his own book. My book would have done even worse than my first book, which didn’t even have any competition!

Bonus disclaimer: Charles Petzold did not pay me to write this, nor did he offer me a cut of his royalties for shilling his book. But that doesn’t mean I won’t accept it! (Are you listening, Charles?)