TL;DR if yer kid steals a computer book, look the other way. Confession: As a teenager in the 90s, I was a klepto. I stole CDs from Musicland. I stole Zip/Jazz

TL;DR if yer kid steals a computer book, look the other way. Confession: As a teenager in the 90s, I was a klepto. I stole CDs from Musicland. I stole Zip/Jazz disks/drives from Best Buy. Heck, I stole padlocks from Ace Hardware with no use for them and a LOT more. BUT, the main thing I really had my eye on was the shelf in bookstore that had all the Inside Macintosh series of books lined up nicely. No one seemed to ever buy one (suburban Minnesota malls/bookstores), all of them always seemed to be there collecting dust, just waiting for the right person who would never arrive to buy them. I would have noticed if suddenly the Macintosh Toolbox Essentials book had been sold. It never was. The relative physical qualities of the books was obvious. Someone had clearly made an effort to make them appealing compared the other books in the computer section like FoxPro, CompTIA, Word, HTML in 3 Minutes, etc. But apparently no one besides me (a 15 year old kid) existed within 60 miles of Minneapolis who needed or wanted them. They were very expensive, and they had like this like halo around them to me as some unattainable items that held all the details I wanted to know but were effectively secret at the time unless you worked at Apple or could gain access to these tomes. I was a very quiet kid, but if you wanted to debate Mac vs PC... I had opinions and not afraid to share them. I was a hardcore enthusiast during what may have been the worst of times for Apple. These books were going to be harder to steal, but I did eventually acquire some. Some came with CD that had an IDE and the API documentation as PDF or whatever it was at the time. It included the docs contained within most of the other books, so I didn't actually have to acquire them all and that was a relief. I read the docs, and I installed the software. I joined Warez groups on AOL (using generated or phished CC numbers of course, I needed way more than 40 hours/month) to pirate CodeWarrior and find out the power of ResEdit etc.. I started making stuff. In 10-11th grade my school offered a programming class. It was Pascal. It was pretty easy at that point for me. I asked my teacher if I could make some Mac programs on my own and submit the source code instead of the assignments, they said ok. They couldn't run it, but just looking the code it was probably obvious that I was doing way more than the assignments. I pretty much ended just up creating my own curriculum and learned a lot in that time. Anyways, I don't steal anymore. That was a phase. I actually think I might have some trauma now when I shop now feeling like I need to be extra careful about appearing that I am _not_ shoplifting, 20+ years later. Anyways, Inside Macintosh holds a very specific feeling of time and place in my life. It is cool that someone else spent the time to publish all this.