opinion of "Inside Macintosh"

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3 total messages Started by starr Mon, 11 Mar 1985 16:57

#790

Author: starr
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1985 16:57

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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

Re: opinion of "Inside Macintosh"

#841

Author: edmoy
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 1985 19:39

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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

Re: opinion of "Inside Macintosh"

#857

Author: Chuq Von Rospach
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1985 19:14

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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!

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