• how to connect and use MIDI instruments and sound cards. While simple MIDI connections are covered—briefly—for completeness, the book assumes that you know enough about MIDI to be able to connect instruments together.
• enough C and C++ to be dangerous. Even really dangerous. Line-by-line explanations of the C and C++ code are not found here.

The C++ examples are written using the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) application framework, and all of the examples are supplied with makefiles for the Microsoft Visual C++ 4.x and 5.x compilers. And, if you have and know how to use the Microsoft compiler and MFC you'll find ToolKit more useful and the book easier to understand.

Maximum MIDI also assumes that you want to:

• write music programs in C or C++.
• learn how MIDI is implemented in Windows 95.
• understand the algorithms used for synchronization, tracks, and Standard MIDI Files.
• use the ToolKit functions as they are, modify them, or write your own MIDI routines from scratch.

Maximum MIDI offers something for programmers of every experience level and is all that most MIDI programmers will need. The examples and code are for Windows 95, but with all of the source code supplied, the C functions and C++ classes can be adapted to other operating systems or modified to do special tasks. While it's not necessary to look at the ToolKit source code in order to write MIDI programs, it is comforting to know that it can be modified and ported to perform all sorts of new tricks. And programmers at all levels can benefit from the supplied source code. After all, the best way to learn new tricks is to steal them from someone else!