Book details of 'Be Developer's Guide (Book 1)'

Title	Be Developer's Guide (Book 1)
Author(s)	The Be Development Team
ISBN	1565922875
Language	English
Published	December 1997
Publisher	O'Reilly & Associates

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Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
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 While the short intervals between release versions of Be guarantee that some of the material here will be out of date, this is nonetheless an excellent reference guide to keep close at hand.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.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
VMS has been ported to the Alpha, and Linux has brought UNIX to the masses (or masses of them, anyway), but they aren't really new. Almost nobody who has installed OS/2 is willing to consider anything else, but it appears to have been unfairly consigned to marginal markets. NT seems to be almost as good as OS/2 (except for being a memory hog) but is limited by its own parent company's insistence on pushing a competing product that gives new meaning to the word "unstable." MacOS has gotten more mature, but that is just another term for "old." Pink and Taligent were brief points of light, but seem to have faded. There was, therefore, great interest in the announcement that the Mac would soon have a new option for an operating system: something called BeOS. There was even greater excitement when it was announced that Be would be available for the Intel platform as well. And there was gloom and despair when Apple announced that it wasn't going to include BeOS with the new Macs, after all. Be has decided to publish the first public release of the Be Operating System anyway. It might be expected that O'Reilly would be first off the mark with the official programmer's reference for BeOS. Or, rather, half the official programmer's reference. "Be Advanced Topics" will contain the information for more specialized interests. The current volume covers the APIs (Application Programming Interfaces, known in Be as "kits") for applications, storage, interfaces, the kernel, and support. For those who have not examined it, it is no wonder that Be was first announced for the Macintosh, since the operating system is optimised for multimedia. BeOS is also intended to take full advantage of the modern desktop environment, with high speed CPUs, large disks, lots of RAM, and multiple processors. Personally, I was most interested in the storage information. Be is designed to handle multiple, and even virtual, file systems. It also determines and tracks file attributes and types, and does that across multiple file systems. This appears to be a smarter and possibly more flexible version of the Mac`s resource forks, and a very useful function in these days of rapidly proliferating applications and formats. This book is not a tutorial on the operating system itself, but rather a programmer's manual. The technically inclined will be able to get some operating system information out of the kit descriptions, and non-programmers might be interested in the book simply as a source of the operating system. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1998
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