Vicki Brown and Chris Nandor have produced a mixed-media (book/CD-ROM) distribution of MacPerl. The book will be published in May 1998 by Prime Time Freeware (PTF; www.ptf.com). Meanwhile, here is the text of the book, made available to you in browsable form!

Notes, Warnings, Etc.

These HTML pages were generated by Myrmidon, a rather nifty little utility that acts like a Mac OS printer driver, but emits HTML. We suspect that this 400-page docu- ment is one of the biggest and meanest ones that Myrmidon has ever faced. Thus, although we are somewhat disappointed that the conversion was not perfect, we are more than a little amazed that it worked at all!

In any event, we have edited the resulting HTML quite a bit, tweaking the formatting, adding links, etc. We know that the results are not perfect, but we think that they are quite serviceable and give a reasonable idea of the nature of the book. Here, for the record, is a list of things that we know about, but have not fixed (yet :-):

• Some of the special characters used in Mac OS and MPW seemingly have no equivalents in HTML. The MPW escape character has an equivalent in HTML, but some browsers display it as a "greater-than (>) symbol". Sigh.

  We have implemented these with tiny GIF files, which (mostly) look like the desired characters. (If you see something that looks like "[!]", let us know...)

• When the font changes back to Palatino (e.g., from bold Geneva), a following space may get dropped. Let us know if you spot any instances of this problem.

• Text in Courier and Geneva fonts, when used in footnotes, gets dropped vertically a few points.

If you find any other problems, please let us (mp-feedback@ptf.com) know!

Table of Contents (Abridged; see Contents for complete list)

Part I - Preparation

0     Introduction
1     A Peek Into Programming
2     A Dip Into Data
3     A Step Into Syntax
4     Installation And Overview

Part II - Learning The Language

5     Building Blocks
6     Stacking The Blocks
7     Filing The Edges
8     Curious Constructions
9     Odd Corners
10    Help!

Part III - Advanced Topics

11    Extensibility And Re-use
12    The MacPerl Package
13    The Toolbox Modules
14    GUI Toolbox Modules
15    Data Storage
16    CGI Scripting
17    Network Programming
18    AppleScript, Etc.

Part IV - Reference

19    Operators
20    Reserved Words
21    Special Variables
22    MPW Perl
23    Building MacPerl And Extensions

Part V - Resources

24    Books, Etc.
25    Contact Information