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Inside Macintosh: Macintosh Toolbox Essentials /

Preface - About This Book /

Conventions Used in This Book

Inside Macintosh uses various conventions to present information. Words that require special treatment appear in specific fonts or font styles. Certain information, such as the contents of registers, use special formats so that you can scan them quickly.

Special Fonts

All code listings, reserved words, and names of actual data structures,
fields, constants, parameters, and routines are shown in Courier (this
is Courier).

Words that appear in boldface are key terms or concepts and are defined in the Glossary.

Types of Notes

There are several types of notes used in this book.

Note

A note like this contains information that is interesting but possibly not essential to an understanding of the main text. (An example appears on page 2-7.)

IMPORTANT

A note like this contains information that is essential for an understanding of the main text. (An example appears on page 5-27.)

WARNING

Warnings like this indicate potential problems that you should be aware of as you design your application. Failure to heed these warnings could result in system crashes or loss of data. (An example appears on page page 2-105.)

Empty Strings

This book occasionally instructs you to provide an empty string in routine parameters and resources. How you specify an empty string depends on what language and development environment you are using. In Rez input files and in C code, for example, you specify an empty string by using two double quotation marks (""), and in Pascal you specify an empty string by using two single quotation marks ('').

Assembly-Language Information

Inside Macintosh provides information about the registers for specific routines like this:

Registers on entry
A0	Contents of register A0 on entry

Registers on exit
D0	Contents of register D0 on exit

In the "Assembly-Language Summary" section at the end of each chapter, Inside Macintosh presents information about the fields of data structures in
this format:

0	what	word	event code
2	message	long	event message
6	when	long	ticks since startup

The left column indicates the byte offset of the field from the beginning of the data structure. The second column shows the field name as defined in the MPW Pascal interface files; the third column indicates the size of that field. The fourth column provides a brief description of the use of the field. For a complete description of each field, see the discussion of the data structure in the reference section of the chapter.