C H A P T E R  7

Writing a User Interface

Most of the people who want to develop software get into it to write programs that have rich user interfaces of some sort. That rich user interface might be through a set of windows, such as programs like Word or many games use, or through a web browser. However, a substantial community of developers largely develops programs that have no user interface. They write programs such as device drivers (the software that lets something like a mouse work with a computer), services (programs that provide information to other programs outside of the user interface), and database engines (which usually manage data in such a way that many programs can access that data). So there's plenty of work to do outside of user interfaces. Still, though, the vi....