Vintage Macintosh Programming Book Library
Nick R. was generous enough to send me his entire vintage Mac programming library to be destructively scanned and shared with the community. We’ve added a few of our own for a pretty huge collection (over 150) of vintage Mac programming related books.
Via Rui Carmo:
[This] is a great resource for people interested in vintage Mac programming, including the original Think Pascal and Think C books I used when I was hacking away at 68k Mac apps.
The books are mostly from the 1980s and 1990s, so it doesn’t have the Rhapsody Developer’s Guide or the early books on Carbon, Cocoa, and the other technologies from NeXT.
Previously:
Update (2025-09-02): John Gruber:
These evoke nostalgia both for the classic Mac era and for the entire notion of “programming books”.
Dave Mark’s 1989 Learn C on the Macintosh was, I think, the first book I read about Mac programming.
A nostalgic list of books for me. I was first learning to write programs in the middle of this era, a time before programming documentation or open source code was available online. Books were it. Printed material was my only way to learn, and it wasn’t easy. In the early 1990s, I wanted to be a programmer, but I wasn’t, and I struggled with that hard truth. That was a long time ago, but I remember, and I kept a few of my old books because I couldn’t bear parting with them.
Update (2025-09-04): Chris Hanson:
In addition to scans of Mac programming books, VintageApple.org has a complete archive of Apple’s develop magazine, which is exemplar of how a platform vendor should communicate with developers.
Between being run by Caroline Rose and Louella Pizzuti and featuring articles about system technologies written by the system software engineers and developer technical support engineers directly responsible for them, it really was an incredible publication.
The original Dylan book was actually converted to HTML back in the very early days of the web. Rainer Joswig has an archive of it as well as an archive of the Dylan Design Notes that clarify, amend, and clean up the language (at least before its syntax was ruined to make it palatable to developers who would never use it anyway).
Previously:
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I have been making great use of many of these books working on some classic Mac programming projects. It's wonderful that these folks have made them all available like this!
I'm also generally harsh on new versions of macOS, but the feature Apple added somewhat recently where it automatically OCRs scanned PDFs so you can search their text has been extremely useful.
@Bri Yes, I think the Live Text OCR (which isn’t just for PDFs) is the best new macOS feature in at least the last five years.
@Bri I've noticed your posts about your vintage programming hobby before, this must be like Christmas for you!
This is really cool. And yes @Michael I'd love to see those next. These are from slightly before my time.
I have an interesting vintage Apple Programming Book.
The paperback that describes the Dylan programming language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Dylan_programming_language
The original Dylan book was actually converted to HTML back in the very early days of the web. Rainer Joswig has an archive of it as well as an archive of the Dylan Design Notes that clarify, amend, and clean up the language (at least before its syntax was ruined to make it palatable to developers who would never use it anyway):
- http://lispm.de/docs/prefix-dylan/book.annotated/
- http://lispm.de/docs/prefix-dylan/design-notes/
I have a private copy that I've been slowly cleaning up, but this is the original, I believe converted by the Dylan team from the original using an early Word-to-HTML tool.
