how do i learn win32 for c++?

i want to plot a graph from scratch and setpixel sucks dick. any good books to look at? msdn encylopedia is way too large.

Also, DevC++ has advanced little in the past 5 years: though it can help with the API, it has no MFC support. There is WxWidgets and a DevC++WxWidgets port, but I forget why I stopped using it.

Again, if you have VC++ (ugh,) go grab an old book. Avoid dot net since you won't learn Win32 the right way. I think the 2002+ compilers are removing legacy Win32 support. The free VC learnig edition or whatever is a damn DOS builder --MS decided that to code even a basic window, after literally half an hour worth of setup changes, they would discourage us via a required manual edit cycle. And still no MFC there. Windows itself is the reason why our code is not windows friendly and still uses DOS boxes, 7 years after the underlying DOS layer was removed and emulated on demand by the OS.