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Thrift Store Book Review: Beginning Mac OS X Programming Or the power and majesty of the semicolon2/15/2019
Beginning Mac OS X Programming
By Michael Trent and Drew McCormack It is not like I get any advertising money for this free web site that Weebly has so generously provided. So I can’t go out and buy the latest tech books to review. Nor do I have the least interest in so doing even if I did. I probably would instead spend the money on a luxurious fast food repast. This tome covers the Mac OS X 1.4 TIGER operating system. As a single person, somewhat by design if not inclination, I have found the presence of some interesting reading material to substitute admirably for a flesh and blood dinner partner. Although distressing that it never seemed to want to help with the lunch or dinner tabs, in most other respects the dog eared copy of Beginning Mac OS X Programming book proved a fine meal companion. Like most of my books, it has not well survived my attentions and its cover has scrolled up and the plastic gloss or whatever that once was the stuff of the cover is snowflake-ing everywhere. My main interest in learning the OS X language is that a while back I was able to swing a deal on Craigslist where I traded a top-of-the-line Keurig Coffee Maker and about six month’s worth of a variety of flavors of K-Cups for an Apple G-5 based computer system. Spurring my desire to obtain that device was about a decade spent as a producer at the Santa Rosa Community Media Center and also at the Petaluma Community Media Center creating video content on just such a system for airing on cable TV through the local cable access program. And of course OS X is what makes the G-5 system click. OS X and the G-5 is a bit like Microsoft’s Windows XP on a powerful Windows system which to me represent the pinnacle of interoperability ever reached by each respective environment. The G-5 to this day remains highly prized by others in the music field. It is the driving force of the independent radio station KOWS-FM where my favorite radio show resides. Today’s consumer PCs seem a far cry from the sturdy monoliths of even not so long ago. They rely more on on-line resources for much of their get up and go while those older models like the G-5 were built to almost be their own ecosystems because the Internet speed back then was anything but speedy. Furthermore the old G-5 from Apple coupled with Final Cut Pro is as smooth a video editing system as your favorite cliché. For a couple of months I studied it dutifully. Reading every sentence and closely examining the simple code examples until I made it up to Page 164, Chapter 6. That is when I stumbled across an old book about the editor of the New Yorker; who founded the magazine, while drowning in my storage shed in yet another unsuccessful effort at organization. After finishing “Genius In Disguise” in my tortoisesque fashion, I found yet another book in a similar vein called “My Time At The New Yorker” in the form of an old disintegrating paperback. Both books served to pull my attention away from the by then unrelenting boredom of attempting to keep up with all of the code and its ramifications. During the first hundred pages or so of Beginning Mac OS X Programming the main refrain at the end of each chapter was more or less: “read the manual dummy!” After that it gets real complex real fast. Me personally, I am not a coder so ultimately it was mostly Greek to me as the saying goes Zorba. I forayed so far because as a tech journalist, I at least will make some attempts here and there to learn more about the vast unknowable-ness of the technology I endeavor to elucidate here upon. But hey, I would wager (very little as I am not the gambling type) that many successful sports writers have never actually felt the thrill of hitting a home run themselves or kicked their own forty-yard field goal. Even so I did manage to retain one or two useful realizations and some assorted factoids from this learned work of Misters Trent and McCormack. I especially enjoyed its brief history of the Unix programming language and learning about its close relation to other important ecosystems like OS X and the C programming language. Therefore what’s old is new again as C and its spawn Unix are both still in business big time. To think that Unix has retained its usability long after Bell Labs was torn asunder along with poor old Ma Bell. I doubt that I personally will ever write any important computer code. But one fact I picked up helped me get a little bit better of a handle on one of my other web sites. When working on it, no matter how much I tried I could never get the text on the site to skip a line when I hit “enter” or otherwise pointed and clicked to where my extra line should go. It looked like it would have a line space when I was in editing mode but whenever I clicked “Publish” all of the text would run together and I would lose all of my line spaces. After reading Chapter 6 I discovered the reason why; the web site where I was encountering that difficulty must be based upon C because the chapter stated that that characteristic of not granting line spaces was a feature of C unless you first typed a semicolon to pave your line space’s way. And C is still widely used to this day; at least it was in 2005 when this book was published. It must at least still be being used by the web site I mentioned as evidenced by my now adding the semicolon and it correcting my line spacing issue. Working on this report has re-inspired me to begin anew to maybe even finishing this book continuing where I left off at Chapter 6 so I can possibly learn some more little C, Unix and OS X gems. Ipso facto (I’ve always wanted to use that word somewhere) should that fine day ever arrive, then stay tuned for: Thrift Store Book Review: Beginning Mac OS X Programming By Michael Trent and Drew McCormack- PART TWO!
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Author/CompilerMartin Monroe
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