Be Developer's Guide (Book 1) [DVD-ROM]

The Be Development Team (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1997

The Be Book the official reference manual for BeOS, gives high-end multimedia developers direct access In the internals of this revolutionary new operating system for Macintosh and clone systems. Includes two volumes and two CD-ROMs that contain the entire operating system as well as a collection of shareware, freeware, and information from the third party BE developer community.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Be operating system (BeOS) is a groundbreaking operation system from Be, Inc., a company founded by former Apple Computer guru Jean-Louis Gassée. Designed from the ground up to leverage the power of today's processors and hardware, the BeOS will be released for both PowerPC and Intel systems. With features such as preemptive multithreading, a 64-bit file system, and dual-processor optimization, the BeOS is a powerful platform for video, audio, and graphics production.

The Be Developer's Guide is the official guide to writing software for this revolutionary platform. The book gives you complete access to the internals of the BeOS and provides coverage of the file system, graphical user interface (GUI) design, application development, and the kernel itself. Because this is a hard-core developer's guide, not an end-user manual, The Be Developer's Guide contains descriptions of most of the C++ classes and functions you'll need to develop for the BeOS. A second volume, Be Advanced Topics covers multimedia and game development, networking, and device drivers.

While the short intervals between release versions of Be guarantee that some of the material here will be out of date, this is nonetheless an excellent reference guide to keep close at hand. The manual includes a complete listing of online resources and the CD-ROM contains a recent version of the entire BeOS.

From Library Journal

BE is a new operating system (OS) designed to run on both PowerPCs and Intel machines and is similar to Linux and UNIX in that it is designed to be multitasking and -processing. This may become a significant OS, but it isn't yet, and it faces quite a battle. Still, BE does already seem to attract users who enjoy playing around and developing applications. The Be development folks are following Apple's old model of the "Inside the Macintosh" series of books for outside developers. If you cater to hackers and other computer science folks, this might be a pretty popular book.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• DVD-ROM: 934 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media (December 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565922875
• ISBN-13: 978-1565922877
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.8 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,339,256 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good API reference, but NOT FOR INTEL USERS., October 9, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Be Developer's Guide (Book 1) (DVD-ROM)

BeOS is a wonderful new OS alternative from Be, Inc. This book will help programmers and developers in their pursuit of extending the functionality of the BeOS.

This book is full of descriptive and helpful API reference material and descriptions of the BeOS. It is NOT a BeOS user manual.

BUT. Be careful of the CD. IT WILL NOT RUN ON INTEL MACHINES, contrary to O'Reilly summary on the back cover. It only runs on the PowerPC. If you're interested in a working copy of the BeOS, buy this book, but also visit Be, Inc. online for an updated version of the OS.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good guide to a great but obsolete OS, April 9, 2003

By 

Sean Quinn "dementia13" (Jackson, TN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Be Developer's Guide (Book 1) (DVD-ROM)

This is the guide to the API of the Be Operating System. It was a great OS with a great API, but it has been abandoned for several years. Worse yet, this is the API for release 3 of the BeOS, and it was up to v.5.1 at the time that Be Inc. went under. If you're already running v.3 or have an old computer you'd like to try it on and want to program in it, then this book is for you. Hardware support was pretty bad even at the time, so it's a very limited range of machines that could run it (nothing modern, except possibly some kind of Athlon with an nVidia video card. If you're learning to program, there's nothing in here for the beginning developer. So, the low rating is not for the quality of this book, but for its usefulness which has passed. BeOS had the potential to be a really great operating system, but Be had staked their entire future on being the next Mac OS. When that didn't happen, be was unable to find its niche in the marketplace. Now, Mac OS X is the closest thing to what BeOS was trying for. It's not as fast as BeOS, but it 's terrific for programming, with great capabilities and real third-party support.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars BEGINNER? LOVE BE?, January 11, 2000

By 

PowerManG4 - See all my reviews

This review is from: Be Developer's Guide (Book 1) (DVD-ROM)

If you are a beginner programmer and you love the Be, this is the book for you. Very helpful for those new to programming. As with most O'Reilly books this is a hit.