> It's been discussed before on HN but it was honestly always kind of baffling to me how any UI toolkit could be so damned complicated as to require so much dea

> It's been discussed before on HN but it was honestly always kind of baffling to me how any UI toolkit could be so damned complicated as to require so much dead tree to cover it all, especially once things like VB6 got off the ground. It wasn't/isn't just a UI toolkit. The O'Reilly series covered all the parts of X, from the drawing primitives, to higher level Xlib, to managing X servers and clients. The equivalent on Windows would be a book series covering GDI, Win32, and configuring every Registry and Group Policy tweak in the Windows shell.