Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!unido!mikros!mwtech!martin
From: martin@mwtech.UUCP (Martin Weitzel)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: need help with 'curses'
Message-ID: <796@mwtech.UUCP>
Date: 15 Jun 90 08:23:01 GMT
References: <23415@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> <4470014@hpindda.HP.COM>
Reply-To: martin@mwtech.UUCP (Martin Weitzel)
Organization: MIKROS Systemware, Darmstadt/W-Germany
Lines: 51

In article <4470014@hpindda.HP.COM> swope@hpindda.HP.COM (Darrell Swope) writes:
[question about curses deleted]
>
>O'Reilly & Associates (981 Chestnut Street, Newton, MA 02164) has
>two very well-written books:
>	"Programming with Curses" by John Strang

A nice book from which you might learn a lot.
It's a pitty that it's not quite uptodate with respect
to SysV Curses. At least the one I have only deals with
the old Ken Arnold Curses, though there's a promise that
there will be a new edition some day for SysV Curses.

>	"Termcap and Terminfo" by John Strang, Tim O'Reilly and Linda Mui

But this one *doesn't* show how to use curses.

Other books I know of which have introductory stuff about curses
are:

	UNIX Programming on the 80286/80386
	by Alan Deikman
	ISBN: 0-934375-83-6

	Topics in C Programming
	Stephen G. Kochan & Patrick H. Wood
	ISBN: 0-672-46290-7

The first book is mixture of somewhat unrelated stuff and
often refers to XENIX and Microport SysV (in other words:
a little out of date). But the curses stuff is not so bad;
at least there's a non-trivial program that demonstrates use of
many features. You should consider to order this book with
the companion disk, if you want to save the time to re-type
all the examples. BTW: There's also an introductory chapter
on writing device drivers.

The second book is quite a good general introduction if you have
made first experiences with C and want to learn more about the 
standard library, UNIX system calls, and UNIX tools. (There's
also a chapter about "make" and a short review on debuggers.)
The only thing that is not so good with this book is that the
word "UNIX" should appear in its title :-), because it's not
general C topics, but much UNIX related stuff.

Finally what about TFM? Well, I may be known here for flaming
the manuals that are delivered with some flavours of UNIX, but
what I have from ISC here in the "Programmers Guide" is not bad
(IMHO it's an unchanged copy of the AT&T manual).
-- 
Martin Weitzel, email: martin@mwtech.UUCP, voice: 49-(0)6151-6 56 83