eho@clarity.Princeton.EDU (Eric Ho) (10/10/89)
Has anyone seen Jim Gosling et al's "The NeWS book" yet ? I just wonder what you guys think of it (if you've it already) in comparison with whatever manuals came from Sun. -- Eric Ho Princeton University eho@confidence.princeton.edu
Andre_Louis_Marquis@cup.portal.com (10/14/89)
If you've been following the development of NeWS and have read the Sun document ation, I don't think you'll get much out of the book. It has a chapter on window syste history and a chapter on porting NeWS. That's about all there is that's extra You'll even recognize many of the screens. Here is a quote from the preface: "This book is an introduction to NeWS: the Networked, Extensible, Window System from Sun Microsystems. It is oriented towards people who have a basic knowledge of programming and window systems who would like to understand more about windowing systems in general and NeWS in particular. A significant portion of the book is devoted to an overview and history of window sytems. While there is enough detail here to allow readers to write simple NeWS applications, the NeWS Reference Manual [SUN87a] should be consulted for a more complete treatment." Novices and the less experienced should find the book illuminating. Andre Marquis
doug@zodiac.ADS.COM (Doug Morgan) (10/17/89)
I got the book a few weeks ago and found it very useful as a good, broad, quick intro to NeWS. At the time, it was at a perfect level for me, not having read the NeWS manual or the Red Book. If I were now to go on to be a NeWS hacker, the book wouldn't be of much value since since it doesn't cover necessary reference material found in the manuals (and the NeWS distributed sources). But then supplying reference material was not the book's goal. It was to introduce someone to NeWS. The book discusses many of the design issues that people here have struggled with in making a CommonLisp/CLOS window toolkit on NeWS. The efficiency considerations in using NeWS seem to be pretty simple, but might discover them for yourself only after code has been written. Reading them in a book is definitely better. I have two minor criticisms. Small wonder, but the book is very positive about NeWS and doesn't talk much about it's drawbacks. The one that strikes us hardest is NeWS's inability to support any high performance frame buffer hardware (even a color lookup table) or to quickly acquire image data. Also, the proofer must have fallen asleep during Chapter 4. There are several typesetting errors, several strange phrases, a figure that does not match the text, and even a PostScript feature (transfer) documented without even mentioning that NeWS 1.1 doesn't implement it. Doug Morgan Advanced Decision Systems doug@ads.com
barnett@crdgw1.crd.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) (10/19/89)
In article <DOUG.89Oct16103633@zodiac.ADS.COM>, doug@zodiac (Doug Morgan) writes: >The >one that strikes us hardest is NeWS's inability to support any high >performance frame buffer hardware (even a color lookup table) or to >quickly acquire image data. Well, to be fair, the book did mention X/NeWS, and stated that X/NeWS deserves it's own book. -- Bruce G. Barnett <barnett@crd.ge.com> uunet!crdgw1!barnett