2006-07-02
The straight-on picture of Amit Singh's Mac OS X Internals looks normal enough, but take a look at the side view!
When I ordered the book from Amazon, I didn't look at page count, so when I picked up the box from my front porch I thought it couldn't possibly contain just one book. Wow, what a monster!
(Full disclosure: Back in Feb. 2004 I reviewed Singh's proposal to Addison-Wesley for this book, gave it an enthusiastic recommendation, and was paid $75.)
I have a bunch of OS internals books, but this one at 1600 pages is more than twice as big as the next biggest. There are two reasons: Mac OS X is the most functionally rich of any OS I know of, and Singh covers it in amazing detail.
I'm only up to page 50, but I've already learned a lot about Mac OS X's fascinating history, which goes back to NextStep and Mach (mid-1980s), and includes parts from the original Mac OS (now represented in Classic and Carbon) and BSD, as well as newer subsystems developed entirely at Apple. The UNIX-like part is called Darwin, and I discussed its API in my own book, Advanced UNIX Programming (link at right). But Darwin is only a fragment of what Singh takes on.
Unfortunately, I do a lot of reading in bed, and this book is dangerous to hold above your head. I'll have to read it sitting at a table, I guess.