Getting Started on Driver Development

Billy ONeal picture Billy ONeal · May 18, 2009 · Viewed 16.8k times · Source

Does anyone have any books/tutorials which may be useful in getting started in Windows device driver development?

For plain Win32/GUI development, Petzold's book seems to be the essential reference. Does such exist for drivers?

I would like to note that I'm not actually talking to hardware -- I actually want to emulate a piece of hardware in software, but I'd like to see how things work in general first.

Billy3

Answer

ChrisW picture ChrisW · May 18, 2009

One thing to beware of is the device driver development (architecture and tools) changes more than Win32 development ... so while Petzold's book from the 1990s is fine for Win32 and may be considered a timeless classic, the architecture for many kinds of drivers (printer drivers, network drivers, etc.) has varied in various O/S releases.

Here's a blog entry which reviews various books: Windows Device Drivers Book Reviews.

Don't forget the microsoft documentation included with the DDK: and, most importantly, the sample drivers (source code) included with the DDK. When I wanted to write a mock serial port driver, for example, I found the sample serial driver documentation combined with the DDK documentation was invaluable (and sufficient).