starr@unmvax.UUCP (03/11/85)
Having obtained the necessary language software to start doing some primitive development work, I now need to educate myself on some of the intricacies of the Macintosh. The obvious (and probably only) source is "Inside Macintosh." I seem to remember some postings about "Inside Mac" several months ago, but I wasn't much interested then. My question is...what does the USENET community think of "Inside Mac?" Is it (as appears) the only source of its type? What level of knowledge must one posess to understand it? I will muchly appreciate any and all comments. Greg
edmoy@ucbopal.CC.Berkeley.ARPA (03/14/85)
Inside Macintosh is the bible for Macintosh development; I know no other source of as detailed information on the internal working. This is not to say that it is a great thing as it is rather confusing and even misleading in spots. Expect to go through it the first time and not understand half of what they are talking about. On second and subsequent reading of various sections, things do begin to fall into place. There still are a lot of holes in the information, and hopefully the final version of Inside Macintosh will have covered most of them up. You will have to know a little Pascal to really understand how to make the toolbox calls. If and when you get into the real deep-down development, knowing the Pascal calling sequence and even some assembly language would be helpful. The most difficult thing about development is debugging. If you use the debuggers from the software suppliment, you will definitely have to know 68000 assembly language. Having used dbx (C source level debugger) on 4.2bsd, it is hard to go back to an assembly language debugger! Edward Moy Computing Services University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 edmoy@ucbopal.APRA ucbvax!ucbopal!edmoy
chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) (03/18/85)
In article <237@ucbopal.CC.Berkeley.ARPA> edmoy@ucbopal.CC.Berkeley.ARPA writes: >You will have to know a little Pascal to really understand how to make >the toolbox calls. Let me correct Edward slightly-- you need to know a LOT of Pascal to really understand the information in Inside Mac. I've been digging through it and trying to make sense of it in terms of C, and I find the transitions painful. I'm currently trying to reimplement all of the example programs in Inside Mac in terms of C, just to give me a feel for how it should look in a different language. The mac is a VERY complicated beastie, and very powerful. Expect a fairly long learning curve before you reallly feel comfortable with it, expect to spend long hours poring through Inside Mac. Don't bother to try without it-- you won't get anywhere. The Mac is quite different than Unix, since you can't really grab a small piece and play with it until you've picked up enough to build a minimal environment (look at Skel, for example...). As far as I'm concerned, though, its worth it. I doubt that we'll see a replacement for Inside Mac from someone other than apple any time soon, so you might as well grab it... chuq -- Chuq Von Rospach, National Semiconductor {cbosgd,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA Be seeing you!