Thread: Newbie coder... Old Mac macgame programming book in C, Good? Or throw it out?

Hello, brand new here... This is my first post.

I'm a green coder... Been learning how to code in C, and I hope to move up the chain to higher programming languages, C++ and C #, just as soon as I feel comfortable enough with the basics of C. I've been slowly going through, and coding the examples in the book... "88 Programs in C" I like it... Especially how every program has flaws in it, so, you're forced to really think out the code as you work through the examples.

So this brings me to my question. I was looking through my library of books... I found one I forgot I even had in there. Its called...

"Tricks of the Mac Game Programming Gurus."

Still have the cd that came with it as well. It appears to be a good book, all 861 pages of it... Plus most if not all of the stuff in it is in C. The problem is its written for Mac OS 9 coders. The stuff on the cd has C source code, but most of the other stuff, compiled and coding software won't work on OS X.

Should I basically discard this book? Or, should I keep it and try to learn stuff within its pages? I'd imagine that the theory to game design wouldn't change too much?

Thoughts?

Green coder? What does that mean?

From what you said, I get the impression that that book is old. Maybe you should go for something fresher...

OS X isn't backwards compatible with OS 9 and older systems. One change is to what the older systems called handles. These were a set of pointers in the first 32k chunk of program memory that pointed to allocated memory that the operating system could move around during some system calls, so any local pointers had to be updated from the handles after those system calls. The code was PC relative code so it could load anywhere, but the compiler took care of that. The code was typically broken up into 32K chunks because of the PC relative addressing. Programmers had to deal with this manually with Apples developer kit (Macintosh Programmer's Workshop), but with tool kits like Think C, there was a visual drag and drop interface to move source code modules between the 32K chunks. There was also a tool kit called Prototyper, where the progammer used a drag and drop interface to design the user interface for a program, and Prototype would generate the code leaving spots for the programmer to fill in with the program specific code, similar to how Visual Studio for Windows works in some cases