As far as books go, I'd recommend anything by Charles Petzold with regards to general Windows programming. He's written "Programming Windows", a Win32/C++ classic, ".NET Book Zero", an introduction to C# and "Applications = Code + Markup", a book on WPF. "Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed" by Adam Nathan is a brilliant, more visually oriented introduction to WPF. Chris Sells and Ian Griffiths also wrote a great book about WPF, called "Programming WPF", I believe.

As far as the SDK goes, I'd start with reading the general developer guidelines from the 3.0 SDK [http://www.touchsmartdevzone.com/download/2074/HP-TouchSmart-SDK-English/] (or even the standalone PDF that is not part of any SDK [http://www.touchsmartdevzone.com/download/60/HP-TouchSmart-Software-Developer... first to get a feel for the architecture of the TouchSmart software, what a "hosted application" is, and what rules a hosted application needs to follow to play well in the TouchSmart environment. Then take a look at the samples that come with the 3.0 SDK. The 4.0 SDK won't help you much until you can get your hands on a machine that has the 4.0 software installed. Those were made available for purchase from http://www.hpdirect.com on Sept 22, 2010.

This is all presupposing that you want to build an app for the TouchSmart environment, of course. If you want to just build a standalone app for Windows, you can forego anything to do with the TouchSmart SDKs and just write an app based on documentation from Microsoft / MSDN.