chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) (09/22/85)
The second volume of Macintosh Revealed -- Programming with the Toolbox (by Stephen Chernicoff, Apple
Press by the Hayden books people) is out. It is a big book (626 pages
including index), and it attempts to tell you how to program the Macintosh.
All of the examples are in Pascal, and Chernicoff ends up building a
program called MiniEdit.
I think he succeeds in doing what he set out to do -- writing a book that
will allow you to do most of what you want to do to the Mac without having
to plow through Inside Mac. He avoids certain special areas (device
drivers, DA's, sound) to keep the technical level of the book tolerable. He
is quite good at explaining rather detailed concepts to the technical
novice without losing the heavyweight reader. It looks to me like you have
enough information in these two books to do about 80% of the kinds of
programming for the Mac you might want to do. For the rest, you would need
IM, but I don't think you'll need it that often.
If you've been waiting for Inside Mac, wait no longer -- this book has most
of the information you'll get in IM, has it put together in an intelligent
and accessible way, and is available now. Even if you find you need IM
later, you'll probably end up using this book most of the time in your
programming and only going to IM when you need the heavy details.
One minor gripe: Chernicoff mentions the apple user interface standards on
a number of occasions, but never really defines any of it. For someone who
doesn't have access to IM, it will be hard to figure out how an application
ought to look. It would have done everyone a service if he had taken some
time (perhaps in an appendix) and summarized the user interface standards
somewhere. Oh, well.
--
Chuq Von Rospach nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA {decwrl,hplabs,ihnp4}!nsc!chuqui
Take time to stop and count the ewoks...db@cbosgd.UUCP (J. Muir) (09/25/85)
I purchased MR Vol II at MACWORLD Expo and got a chance to talk to Steve C. as he was autographing my copy (eat your hearts out!). On behalf of all C programmers out there, I submitted a plea for an addendum volume containing the interface descriptions and some examples in C. On behalf of myself, I answered the "which dialect" question with "Aztec C" (sorry Mac C and Megamax owners). Don't know if my request will produce any tangible results, but it didn't hurt to ask (apparently he's gotten other requests for a C version of the books). We can but hope (and wait). Dave Bursik/..cbosgd!db
wbell@utcs.uucp (Warren Bell) (09/26/85)
In article <1516@cbosgd.UUCP> db@cbosgd.UUCP (J. Muir) writes: >... >On behalf of all C programmers out there, I submitted a plea for an >addendum volume containing the interface descriptions and some examples >in C. On behalf of myself, I answered the "which dialect" question >with "Aztec C" (sorry Mac C and Megamax owners). > >Don't know if my request will produce any tangible results, but >it didn't hurt to ask (apparently he's gotten other requests for >a C version of the books). We can but hope (and wait). > >Dave Bursik/..cbosgd!db On the same topic, does anyone know when/if Apple is going to release a Pascal Compiler for the Mac? -- ---- University of Toronto Computing Services Warren Bell UUCP: {cbosgd,decvax,harpo,ihnp4,utcsri,{allegra,linus}!utzoo}!utcs!wbell BITNET: wbell at utoronto