Those books were both brilliant. I don't recall his tech books being "bad", at least in terms of being somehow worse the the other Windows programming books that several large publishing houses cranked in volume.

I first came across Petzold this weekend while watching a talk by Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin on the future of programming. Martin was discussing Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers" and recommended reading it and Petzold's "Annotated Turing". I currently have Petzold's book on my "to-buy" list so am glad to see it spoken of highly.

Well, I didn't hear about the book yet. But seeing as your coment and the parent suggest it, I'll add it to my to-read list as well.

The Code book I've heard people speak highly off before but have not read it yet myself.