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From: chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Macintosh Revealed, Vol II
Message-ID: <3167@nsc.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 22-Sep-85 15:12:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: nsc.3167
Posted: Sun Sep 22 15:12:33 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 1-Oct-85 07:40:27 EDT
Organization: Uncle Chuqui's Lemming Farm
Lines: 34
Keywords: book review, good

The second volume of Macintosh Revealed -- Programming with the Toolbox (by Stephen Chernicoff, Apple
Press by the Hayden books people) is out. It is a big book (626 pages
including index), and it attempts to tell you how to program the Macintosh.
All of the examples are in Pascal, and Chernicoff ends up building a
program called MiniEdit.

I think he succeeds in doing what he set out to do -- writing a book that
will allow you to do most of what you want to do to the Mac without having
to plow through Inside Mac. He avoids certain special areas (device
drivers, DA's, sound) to keep the technical level of the book tolerable. He
is quite good at explaining rather detailed concepts to the technical
novice without losing the heavyweight reader. It looks to me like you have
enough information in these two books to do about 80% of the kinds of
programming for the Mac you might want to do. For the rest, you would need
IM, but I don't think you'll need it that often. 

If you've been waiting for Inside Mac, wait no longer -- this book has most
of the information you'll get in IM, has it put together in an intelligent
and accessible way, and is available now. Even if you find you need IM
later, you'll probably end up using this book most of the time in your
programming and only going to IM when you need the heavy details. 

One minor gripe: Chernicoff mentions the apple user interface standards on
a number of occasions, but never really defines any of it. For someone who
doesn't have access to IM, it will be hard to figure out how an application
ought to look. It would have done everyone a service if he had taken some
time (perhaps in an appendix) and summarized the user interface standards
somewhere. Oh, well.


-- 
Chuq Von Rospach nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA {decwrl,hplabs,ihnp4}!nsc!chuqui

Take time to stop and count the ewoks...