BKBEDVGD.RVW   980118

"Be Developer's Guide", Be Development Team, 1997, 1-56592-287-5,
U$49.95/C$70.95
%A   Be Development Team custservices@be.com
%C   103 Morris Street, Suite A, Sebastopol, CA   95472
%D   1997
%G   1-56592-287-5
%I   O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
%O   U$49.95/C$70.95 800-998-9938 fax: 707-829-0104 nuts@ora.com
%P   946 p. + CD-ROM
%T   "Be Developer's Guide"

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   BKBEDVGD.RVW   980118