"If you mean "Programming Windows - The definitive guide to the WIN32 API" I'm afraid that Petzold doesn't cover serial or parallel communication in his book at all. In fact, you can't do parallel port comms using the API."
Dear Donald;
I know Petzold does not cover serial or parallel communication. But under win32 serial and parallel comm. is strongly related with win32 API. Under win32. accessing serial/parallel port is same as accessing a file. The programmer that will program serial or parallel comm. should understand: Overlapped I/O, Multitredding, Device Contex Block, Read File,Write File, Wait For Single Object, and comm port events. Thus the programmer should understand windows API. Of course for a ready made solution he/she use the Hyper Term or other stuff or simply use MS Comm that is an ActiveX and can be inportes to the Visual C or Delphi easly.
Regards.
Ertan Balaban