Preface - About This Book
This book, Inside Macintosh: Open Transport, describes the 1.1 release of the Open Transport networking system, which is a communications architecture that can be used to implement any number of networking and other communications systems. This book discusses only the implementation of Open Transport 1.1 on Apple Macintosh computers. Open Transport provides a set of programming interfaces for applications and processes running on Macintosh computers.
To get the most out of this book, read the chapters that cover general Open Transport concepts first. If you are planning to use an AppleTalk or TCP/IP protocol, read the protocol-specific chapters after you are familiar with Open Transport's architecture and general functions. The book is organized with the more general Open Transport concepts covered in the first seven chapters, with the more specific material in the later chapters of the book.
- Note
- All of the Open Transport 1.1 programming interfaces described in this book are compatible with the Mac OS 8 environment.
It is best to begin by reading the introductory chapter, "Introduction to Open Transport," because it introduces many terms that are used throughout the rest of this book. This chapter also gives an overview of the Open Transport architecture and the way it is used to implement networking protocols.
The chapter "Providers," describes the generic Open Transport functions that you can use with any provider. The chapters "Endpoints" and "Mappers" introduce functions that are particular for endpoint and mapper providers. The next three chapters, "Option Management," "Configuration Management,"and "Process Management" continue the general discussion of Open Tranport concepts.
The chapter "TCP/IP Services " and the seven AppleTalk-specific chapters describe how to use the Open Transport implementations of AppleTalk and TCP/IP. The last chapter, "Serial Endpoint Providers," describes how to use Open Transport with a serial driver.
At the end of this book are two appendixes: "Open Transport and XTI" and "OT Result Codes."
If you are new to programming for the Macintosh, you can read the book Inside Macintosh:Overview for a general introduction to general concepts of Macintosh programming. Other books in the Inside Macintosh series are helpful for specific information about other aspects of the Macintosh Toolbox and the Macintosh Operating System. In particular, to benefit most from this book, you should already be familiar with the run-time environment of Macintosh applications, as described in the two books Inside Macintosh: Processes and Inside Macintosh: Memory.
- "Open Transport and XTI." This appendix describes the correspondence between the XTI and Open Transport client programming interfaces. Open Transport is a superset of XTI and therefore includes functions that are not defined in XTI. This appendix focuses on how general provider functions and endpoint functions correspond to XTI functions.
- "Result Codes." This appendix lists the result codes returned by the Open Transport preferred-C functions.
The information in this book constitutes only a part of the body of literature documenting the AppleTalk and TCP/IP protocol families and the XTI standard upon which Open Transport is based.
For more information about the AppleTalk protocol family, see the book Inside AppleTalk, second edition, which has detailed specifications for each of the AppleTalk protocols.
For more information about the TCP/IP protocol family, see any good book on TCP/IP. Two such books for information on TCP/IP protocol internals are TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1 by W. Richard Stevens and Internetworking with TCP/IP, Volume 1 by Douglas E. Comer.
For more information about the XTI standard, see X/Open CAE Specification (1992): X/Open Transport Interface (XTI). The Open Transport TCP/IP software modules are based on the UNIX Streams architecture. For more information about Streams, see UNIX System V Release 4: Programmer's Guide: STREAMS.
Preface Contents
- Format of a Typical Chapter
- Conventions Used in This Book
- Special Fonts
- Types of Notes
- The Development Environment