Back in 1998 I wrote my first book, all about how to port Unix applications to what was then seen as a brand new operating system set to take on the world. BeOS was at the time seen as a revolutionary OS containing a number of radical features and departures from many of the traditional current operating systems, but with some new and improved functionality, like an improved GUI layer, better networking and subsystem interfaces, and a new filesystem. 

At the time I’d spent a lot of time porting applications to HP-UX and Solaris, and took to BeOS immediately, which is when I was contacted about writing a book. 

The history of the book development is unremarkable, but after troubles at the original publisher it was eventually published by Morgan Kaufmann. After some negotiation, I’ve now had the book copyright signed back over to me, and with the burgeoning Haiku community, I’ve decided to release the book freely under a Creative Commons licence. 

You can download it here: http://bit.ly/WeKkJR

This is a rough-ish copy of the book, based on the original content I submitted over 15 years ago. It’s complete, and formatted but understandably quite dated. Please comment or email if you have changes of improvements that you would like to see.