Mac Programming Revealed

Tom Thompson

ULTIMATE MAC PROGRAMMING by Dave Mark, IDG Books, ISBN 1-56884-195-7, $39.95

I firmly believe one reason the Mac hasn't garnered a greater market share is because of the paucity of books on how to program it. The number of authors providing solid Mac programming information can be numbered on one hand: Scott Knaster, Stephen Chernicoff, and Dave Mark. I bought all their works. I especially liked Mark's Learn C on the Macintosh volumes, which show you how to access the MacToolbox using the C language--not a minor task with the Toolbox oriented around Pascal.

Now Mark is back, bringing with him the expertise of numerous Mac programming wizards, such as Donald Olson, a member of Apple's OpenDoc team; Jim Reekes, who wrote the Sound Manager for System 7; Greg Anderson, who wrote the Scriptable Finder; and many others. Their expertise is consolidated in a 500-page tome appropriately titled Ultimate Mac Programming .

There's no introductory material here. You jump straight into a chapter on the Sound Manager and are taught how to add sound capabilities to an application. Another chapter details how to patch the Mac OS, with good treatment on writing "fat" (i.e., native PowerPC) traps. There's also an example of how to play a QuickTime movie, plus other practical odds and ends. The source code for these examples and a demonstration version of the Metrowerks C compiler is packed on a CD-ROM that's bundled with the book. I learned a lot from the book and highly recommend it.