"Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach" by Amit Singh

Although I havent written any actual code in years, it turns out there is still a little geek inside me. I couldn't wait to get my hands on this book. Who rubs his hands greedily a the prospect of reading about an operating system? I need help...

My motivation was largely nostalgia and curiosity. I have been a MacOS user for about 2 years now and I can say without reservation that it is the best personal computer experience in existence. Today's MacOS offers a fantastic user experience which only promises to get better wit next years update.

Having said all that, the MacOS world includes a ton of jargon that I was unfamiliar with. Cocoa, Carbon, Aqua, Darwin, Quartz, etc and so on. As a user, I dont need to know what this stuff is but I was curious. Hence my interest in the book.

And I wasnt disappointed.

Originally I tried to buy the book on Amazon but it was too heavy to qualify for my AmazonPrime free shipping so I opted for checking the book out of the library. At 1600+ pages, this sucker includes far more than you ever wanted to know about the MacOS. The first 150 pages or so are for a general technical audience. The remainder of the book is dry-as-bones technical jargon appropriate for an operating system class and academics - which is the books intended audience.

I will admit that I was surprised by what I read. I knew the MacOS was a terrific consumer product but I had no idea how complex it was underneath or how long it has been in development. To get to this point, the MacOS builds on decades of work on BSD unix, Mach and OpenStep/NeXT and all that effort shows.

Your average consumer will enjoy the Mac for its stability, elegance, the beauty of its PDF-based fonts, and ease of use. Programmers however get a lot more; a super development platform that only promises to get better with the switch to Intel hardware. One can use Carbon to write programs in C or Cocoa to write object-oriented programs in Objective-C or Java. You can write command-line stuff or use the Mac's OpenGL-based interfaces. The MacOS platform is chock full of technologies for devs.

After reading about all the details and complexity of the MacOS, the prospect of writing a new OS from scratch is just daunting to me; I dont see how one could ever catch up with the MacOS or its UNIX brethren. Come next March, it will be interesting to see how Vista and the MacOS stack up.