Programming Windows is THE authoritative source on Win32 programming: https://www.charlespetzold.com/books.html

It is a fantastic book, I learned everything I know on Win32 from it. Wrote real time scientific software in windows for ~10y! We did it all, external hardware control, custom UIs, etc. Thanks Ryan Geiss for your timing info.

Right about VC6 was the sweet spot imo, C/C++ with lightning fast UI for docs and more. Tools got out of the way. Once other languages got involved (C#?) the docs got out of control and harder to use, and the UI started to get a little overloaded.

The snappiness of those old windows systems was pretty great.