Beginning to program on BeOS/Haiku - Part 1

Submitted by Scott McCreary on Wed, 10/10/2007 - 23:25.
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I have been using BeOS since 1998 but have never written one line of code for it. When Be announced the sale to Palm in 2001 and the OpenBeOS project was kicked off I decided to do my part to help keep BeOS alive and started BeDrivers.com. I also decided to go back to school and learn more about programming. I've so far taken two semesters of C++, one semester of Java, one semester of Assembly, and a few others. I'm taking this semester off and have decided to try reading through the Programming the Be Operating System book I bought 5 or 6 years ago. Well so far I'm through the first four chapters and I'm understanding it this time. Seems it helps if you understand C++ before you read it, go figure. Anyways I'm going to post my progress here in hopes that others interested in starting to program in the Be API might find it useful.
The book is available online and you can also still pick it up from Amazon and other sites new or used, with used prices under $10. So you have no excuse for not getting a print version.
I still need to set up my BeOS partition with the developer's tools and such. Once I get that set up and running I'll try out some of the sample code and start posting more details on my progress through the book. It seems that this book could be updated with chapter questions and exercises which would then allow it to serve as a good text for a GUI programming class. So far from the early chapters, it seems that the Be API makes for a good intro to GUI programming. I had hoped that the Java class I took would have included more on the GUI programming, but we didn't even get to GUI stuff until the final week of that class. This book starts right off with a Hello World that is drawn in the familiar BeOS style window.
Check back in a week or two for more on my progress through the book. If you have any specific questions just post a comment here. If you have the book already but haven't learned to program in BeOS, why not join in? Try reading one chapter a week for the next 10 weeks.
-scottmc