Paul:

The Macintosh Programming primer will never replace all that data in the Inside Macintosh series from Apple. I still ended up buying them after reading and learning from the Macintosh Programming Primer for C programming. But the great thing about this book was the clear way that it went about explaining how the toolbox works.

It deals with one idea and program step at a time and explains how it works and gives a couple of examples that you can put into the LightSpeed C programs. You get a feel what each step is doing.

It starts with the elementry "Hello World" program, then with drawing with quickdraw, next Windows, then managing an event, then setup for menus, then working with dialog boxes and finally a chapter called toolbox potpourri where it discusses file management, sound manager, printing manager, and scrap manager. It has a chapter on using ResEdit and a final chapter that talks about various sources of information on the macintosh. It's oriented around the use of C with Lightspeed C as the program for manipulating and programming in C.

What impressed me most about the design of the book was the simple step by step way the author goes through the toolbox functions and illustrates with lots of programs to type in, almost all of which require ResEdit.

Of course the main reason I like the book was that I knew almost nothing about macintosh programming and after using the book I now feel that I have a good basis to start learing to program in C with lightspeed C. It assumes that you know C already, tells you the basic difference between C and Pascal and gives the examples in C. After reading the book, I concluded that if I was only trying to learn to program the Mac, I would learn Pascal instead.