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An office I worked in in the early 90's had a shelf with a ten(?) volume set of X windows books - and each individual book was a thick bugger. I'd only had flee
by tragomaskhalos 10y ago
An office I worked in in the early 90's had a shelf with a ten(?) volume set of X windows books - and each individual book was a thick bugger. I'd only had fleeting experience of it, but remember thinking "how complex can this thing be ?!"
- pmontra 10y agoI remember them. Those were both the guides and the references for the whole X11 ecosystem. I guess many modern pieces of software would be that large if properly typesetted and printed on paper. Luckily we fit them on the web and some thousands of blog posts, stackoverflow and more.
- arethuza 10y agoI think a lot of those books covered stuff that most people writing applications never really had to worry about - I'm pretty sure I got by with one on Xlib and maybe one on Xt?
- david-given 10y agoI remember them --- they were really good. The architecture was layered, too, so you typically only ever used one book at a time. Doing raw graphics operations? All you need is the Xlib book. Xt/Xaw? There's a book for that. Motif? There's a book for that, too, but it wasn't in our set. The raw X protocol was, IIRC, documented in volume 0.
- mcguire 10y agoMuch of the mass was printed man pages for every single API call.
- DonHopkins 10y agoI was on Sun's X11/NeWS beta program, and each time they came out with a new release, they'd send me an entire whole new set of X11 and Adobe PostScript manuals! I appreciated it, but had those manuals coming out of my ears! It was great having all those Red Books to pass out at parties, but nobody ever wanted the XView manuals. ;)