Preface

If you want to get up to speed quickly on using Carbon to create Mac OS X applications, this is the book for you. It shows how to put together a Carbon application that does all the things commonly found in an application, such as handling windows, responding to menu commands and controls in the interface, printing documents, and opening and saving files. The application you'll create in this book isn't one of those boring computational programs that figure prime numbers or compute factorials. Instead, you'll put together something that could be of practical value as we enter the third millennium—a moon travel planner.

This book is not an exhaustive guide to writing Carbon applications. We've limited the topics and scope of coverage to those we think are most important for programmers new to Carbon. We've provided a road map to all the Carbon managers and services (Chapter 1) and an introduction to a few advanced topics—scripting, tab controls, threads, and multiprocessing (Chapter 14). So once you are finished with this book, you'll be prepared to write a Carbon application on your own.