Customer Reviews

Apple Inside Macintosh, Volumes I, II, and III

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Yes, it's true that Apple has all its "Inside Macintosh" books available online now. Or you could get the Inside Macintosh CD-ROM, which contains some 26 volumes of these amazing books.

But if you're like me, you aren't about to sit in front of your computer reading a book of this length and depth. This is one to curl up in a chair with and really get into.

Continuing where "Inside Macintosh: Macintosh Toolbox Essentials" left off, this book describes more Mac OS features, such as the Resource Manager(worth purchasing just for this chapter), Scrap Manager, and the Component Manager. Other chapters cover more obscure subjects, Like Icon Utilities, Translation Manager, and List Manager.

There's also a chapter on Control Panels, but Joe Zobkiw's book "A Fragment of Your Imagination" will help you a lot more in that direction. This book isn't so much about how you should implement, but about how things really work at the deepest level.

As the title of this review says, this is a book for programmers, not novices. If you're not intimidated by long code examples or explanations of OS behavior at the byte and bit level, you will not find a more thorough explanation of what's going on in Macintosh applications. Note that code samples are in Pascal, so some translation is required if you want to use them in your C/C++ programs.

(If you're just starting out, you're better off getting the previous volume, "Macintosh Toolbox Essentials," which covers more fundamental Toolbox features. That one is a five-star book!)