Mary Rose Cook's notebook

The public parts of my notebook.

My homepage.

My first programming books

Insanely, there was a copy of this book in Heffers bookshop in Cambridge where I grew up. It was alongside other books in the programming section like Sex, Lies and Video Games (How to Write a Macintosh Arcade Game).

I went through every book in that section, trying to figure out which one might be accessible enough to help me figure out programming.

When I was thirteen, I used ResEdit, the MacOS 7 resource fork editing program, to change icons and keyboard shortcuts on my parents’ Macs. Somehow, that led to me discovering the programming section at the local bookshop.

Eventually, I chose the Programming Starter Kit for Macintosh. I chose it because it seemed to have the most complete set of software for writing code. I found it very hard to understand. (I remember being confused by functions returning error codes.) I abandoned that book after two hundred baffling pages.

I bought Mac Programming for Dummies. That was easier.

Afterwards, I worked through Foundations of Mac Programming and this led to me writing a word processor. This was really just a window you could type into.

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