Customer Reviews

Be Developer's Guide (Book 1)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

The BeBook is the ``bible'' for programming on the BeOS; it provides a concise summary of the Be class libraries and the posix-compatible interfaces. For Be programmers old enough to still prefer programming documentation you can carry around, or read in bed, this is an indispensable book.

The book is laid out nicely, with topics grouped as the Be programmer finds them: into various ``kits.'' Each kit begins with an introduction to what that kit accomplishes within the BeOS, a description of the interactions between this and other kits and the BeOS system. Finally, each class implemented by the kit is examined in detail, with each public member described.

The BeBook is intended to be all the reference the average Be programmer will need, and it probably attains this goal. It does not, however, address several relatively common subsystems, such as networking, at all. These topics are relegated to a sister volume, BeOS Advanced Topics.

The examples given in the book are clear and well explained, but limited. Combined with the example code provided with the BeOS, and with the information on-line at the Be web site, a large enough body of work exists to adequately demonstrate the principles introduced in the book. I would still like to see more example code included in the book itself, for reference when browsing on an airplane (or sailboat) not connected to the Internet.

Physically, the book is as well constructed and beautifully laid out, as we have all come to expect from O'Reilly and Associates.

In all, I rate this book as an excellent buy, if a bit pricey; the BeOS CD-ROM included is out of date and therefore a waste for current purchasers. Dropping the CD-ROM and $5 or $10 from the price would be a welcome break.

I'm a associate teacher of computer science that loves operating system, I have used several operating systems and enforce my students the adventages of all the operating systems, and to learn to make a difference, several have try it and love it, and now they and myself are looking forward to get the update and more software for it. It is a ...MUST have operating system ( alternate and secure "stable 100%")

As Be has decided to drop the PPC support in favor of the Intel development the sheer fact that the CD won't run on intel machines points directly to the limited help of this book...useful but only so far