Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach, by Amit Singh, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2006.  ISBN-10: 0321278542, ISBN-13: 978-0321278548.

"Overall, I recommend this book to anyone that wants a deeper understanding of the internals of the Macintosh. If you are a developer, this is a must-have book."--Justin Williams, Founder, Maczealots.com

"It's a book that every administrator and developer of almost any kind of hardware and software would want to own. It explains the how as opposed to the what of OS X more clearly, thoroughly and intelligently than any other book on the market."--Mark Sealey, Contributing Editor, ThinkSecret.com

Mac OS X, as a system, is usually either perceived as a black box, or is wrongly understood due to longstanding myths and stereotypes. Some of the most innovative facilities in OS X are actually mature, stable technologies that have been painstakingly developed over the past 15 years by Apple and the open source community as a whole. This is not a tutorial or how to book.

This is also NOT a book for learning Mac OS X programming. Unlike any other Mac title on the market, Amit Singh digs into the underbelly of the Mac OS X and provides a clear, easy to follow explanation of the design and inner workings of Mac OS X. This is a self-contained book on thoroughly understanding core Mac OS X technologies, specifically the knowledge and appreciation of how different things connect together, how they work internally, where they came from, how they evolved, and so on. The orgins of this book come from Amit's postings on http://www.kernelthread.com/ which have been slashdotted 15 times from Dec 2003-June 2005.

Download Mac OS X Internals: Chapter 1 

Pdf format, 3.28mb, 146pages. 

Document Version 2.0.1 (July 28, 2006)

Latest version available at http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter1/

Mac OS X Internals Official Website

This is the book's accompanying web site. Besides book-related information and updates, the site has a blog and a set of forums. Both the blog and the forums are meant for discussion and information dissemination related to Mac OS X Internals, while not being limited to the book's context. Note that the forums are already "live".

From the Back Cover:

Mac OS X was released in March 2001, but many components, such as Mach and BSD, are considerably older. Understanding the design, implementation, and workings of Mac OS X requires examination of several technologies that differ in their age, origins, philosophies, and roles.

Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach is the first book that dissects the internals of the system, presenting a detailed picture that grows incrementally as you read. For example, you will learn the roles of the firmware, the bootloader, the Mach and BSD kernel components (including the process, virtual memory, IPC, and file system layers), the object-oriented I/O Kit driver framework, user libraries, and other core pieces of software. You will learn how these pieces connect and work internally, where they originated, and how they evolved. The book also covers several key areas of the Intel-based Macintosh computers.

A solid understanding of system internals is immensely useful in design, development, and debugging for programmers of various skill levels. System programmers can use the book as a reference and to construct a better picture of how the core system works. Application programmers can gain a deeper understanding of how their applications interact with the system. System administrators and power users can use the book to harness the power of the rich environment offered by Mac OS X. Finally, members of the Windows, Linux, BSD, and other Unix communities will find the book valuable in comparing and contrasting Mac OS X with their respective systems.

Mac OS X Internals focuses on the technical aspects of OS X and is so full of extremely useful information and programming examples that it will definitely become a mandatory tool for every Mac OS X programmer.

About the Author:

Amit Singh is an operating systems researcher currently working at Google. Amit was formerly with the IBM Almaden Research Center. Previously, he worked for a Silicon Valley startup that did cutting-edge work in the virtualization of operating systems. Amit also was a member of technical staff in the Information Sciences Research Center at Bell Laboratories, where he worked on operating systems and networking. He created and maintains http://www.osxbook.com and http://www.kernelthread.com.

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