Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!sahayman
From: sahayman@watmath.waterloo.edu (Steve Hayman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Books to learn by? [Specifically Abacus book 10 on MIDI]
Keywords: books
Message-ID: <17191@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Date: 1 Mar 88 22:27:06 GMT
References: <40.007051@adam.DG.COM> <149@bdt.UUCP> <328@nunki.usc.edu> <121@richp1.UUCP>
Reply-To: sahayman@watmath.waterloo.edu (Steve Hayman)
Organization: Math Faculty Computing Facility, U. of Waterloo
Lines: 33

>>What books should I get/avoid? Abacus' line of ST books seem
>>interesting, but I've seen them flamed/praised, and I'm not so sure.

I was generally happy with books 2 and 3 (Internals, and GEM, can't
remember the exact titles, sorry) but was quite disappointed with
book 10, Introduction to MIDI.  

For example, the book completely overlooks the important aspect of
reading MIDI data from the synthesizer and time-stamping it so that you
can send it out again properly (since MIDI itself contains no notion of
duration codes - all it is are note-start and note-end commands, and
the application software has to pause for the appropriate length of
time between the start and end of the note.)

There was some sort of a throwaway line in the book like "We have
decided to leave this aspect of MIDI programming up to you, so that
you'll have something to do!"  How about "We don't know how to do it!",
if that's what you mean.

I think the book would be interesting to people who either know nothing
at all about MIDI or who would like to see complete source code for a
large application [it's a program for creating tunes by picking notes
and time durations off of a menu - but I don't think it ever actually
*reads* anything from the synthesizer] - but if you already know
something about what the MIDI protocol is or are looking for discussion
of some truly useful MIDI routines or programming techniques or
advanced features of the MIDI standard, this is probably not the book
for you.  Buy "Keyboard" magazine instead, the monthly columns there
are much more useful.

Steve Hayman
U. of Waterloo
sahayman@math.waterloo.edu