Hello,
First of all, if your intention is to write a Win-Application by using the pure API you can do this in pure C and the simplest Compiler you can find. There are some concepts built in within the Win-API, you have to know if you want to do the job in this way.
The best source avaliable if it comes to ressources is as far as I know: WIN32 Programming, written by Richard J. Simon.
By the way the book lay in front of me at this very moment. Its the so called API-Bible and has 1350 pages.
The very basic concepts delivers the well known Petzolds "Windows Programming".
If you own Visual C/C++ which includes the MFC you can make life easier because you are able to create your application 10 times faster without any restrictions in terms of hardware access.
You are so much faster in virtue of the provided class-Infrastructure delivered by the whole MFC concept. Building up Dialog Boxes and so on is supported by the Ressource-Editor, so one is completely relieved from thinking about the switches inside the API-Functions and the issue to get the right appearence if it comes to Dialog Boxes and other so called Ressources.
Mixing MFC and API is not a problem at all.
E.G. one of the easiest basic functions <<peep()>> which animates the pc-speaker to send out a peep, isn't wrapped into a class but have to be called as peep() simply.
If you want to use MFC, study Jeff Prosises "Windows Programming with MFC"
Hope that helps
Robby