Windows® Internals, Sixth Edition, Part 1

Foundation Concepts and Terms

In the course of this book, we’ll be referring to some structures and concepts that might be unfamiliar to some readers. In this section, we’ll define the terms we’ll be using throughout. You should become familiar with them before proceeding to subsequent chapters.

Windows API

The Windows application programming interface (API) is the user-mode system programming interface to the Windows operating system family. Prior to the introduction of 64-bit versions of Windows, the programming interface to the 32-bit versions of the Windows operating systems was called the Win32 API to distinguish it from the original 16-bit Windows API, which was the programming interface to the original 16-bit versions of Windows. In this ...