Introduction to the Amiga Programmer's Suite Book 1.01, by RJ Mical
Copyright (C) 1986, 1987, Robert J. Mical
20 October 1987


Welcome to the Amiga Programmer's Suite, Book 1.  Presented here 
are several tools for Amiga developers.  I hope you find them useful.  

The Amiga Programmer's Suite is an evolving entity.  It's being 
designed with several goals in mind.  

First and foremost, the intent is to make programmers' lives easier by 
creating mechanisms that every programmer wants sooner or later; an 
example of this is the FileIO Requester library, which is a mechanism that 
creates a requester and allows the user to browse through the Amiga 
filesystem using an Intuition interface.  Such a tool is very 
complicated to design, for it requires a good amount of Exec, 
AmigaDOS and Intuition knowledge, combined with a familiarity of 
user-interface techniques and touch of graphic design.  The prospect 
of doing the work involved in creating a fully-capable requester 
such as this has boggled the minds of many designers and made them soft.  
Now, by using the Programmer's Suite, designers can use this library
with their programs, making the programs easier and more enjoyable to
use while costing the developer very little effort.

The second intent of the Programmer's Suite is to give new Amiga 
tools to the developer.  The XText mechanism is an example of this.  
XText gives programmers a new, powerful way to create text on the Amiga.  
Another example is DoRequest(), which manages requesters automatically.  
These are tools that are part of the Amiga system and may one day 
appear in the Amiga ROM Kernel.

The third intent of the Programmer's Suite is to provide a tutorial 
on how to program the Amiga.  The source code and examples may be 
used as a learning aide for the novitiate and the old-salt alike.
I hope you get something good from them.


So enjoy!  And, as always, go for the gold.  You know can do it.


   - RJ Mical



P.S.  I'm currently compiling notes for Books 2 and 3.  If you have any 
suggestions for these books, and if you have comments and criticisms about 
Book 1, please send them to me at:

        RJ Mical
        Suite 123
        999C Edgewater Blvd.
        Foster City, CA    94404


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=== Copyright, Distribution, and Registration Notices =======================
=============================================================================

The Amiga Programmer's Suite Book 1 is copyrighted but freely distributable.
All copyright notices and all file headers must be retained intact.
The Amiga Programmer's Suite Book 1 may be compiled and assembled, and the 
resultant object code may be included in any software product.  However, no 
portion of the source listings or documentation of the Amiga Programmer's 
Suite Book 1 may be distributed or sold for profit or in a for-profit 
product without the written authorization of the author, RJ Mical.

You should register your copy with me.  Those who register will get:  
updates which should include both bug fixes and enhancements; announcement 
of and price break on future Suite books; pleasant sense of having done 
a good thing. 

To register your copy, send $15 to RJ Mical at the below address
(price subject to change without notice).  I will return a receipt 
along with your registration number:

   APS Registration
        RJ Mical
        Suite 123
        999C Edgewater Blvd.
        Foster City, CA    94404


The Amiga Programmer's Suite was created to help you do it to the 
Amiga computer.  Bang on it well.  The author, RJ Mical, wishes that 
if you use this code in your program, you give him some discreet mention
somewhere.