This revised manual has been a joy to work on for me. The feedback Metrowerks has received since the first version has been excellent and we hope to see more. I want to thank all of you for your feedback and suggestions.
With any change of authors, there's always some trepidation as you try to follow in someone else's well laid footsteps. I would like to thank Jim Trudeau, my mentor since I joined Metrowerks, for his guidance, advice, and constructive criticism of my work. Jim offered many suggestions for parts of this book and I've endeavored to implement them to make this manual clearer in some areas.
Richard Atwell provided many suggestions and helped clear up resource and stationery issues.
John Daub provided a lot of feedback on class registration and debugging issues. John was also extremely influential in helping me understand some of the intricacies of PowerPlant and C++. Thanks John!
Greg Dow, PowerPlant's chief architect, has kept PowerPlant up-to-date. He and other engineers have guided PowerPlant's evolution, added new functionality, streamlined code, and much more. Greg has made PowerPlant both a joy and easy to use.
Last but not least, I want to thank the folks at "the MOST Online," particularly radar pangaean (no capitals intentional) for reviewing an early version of this rewrite and allowing me to use them as guinea pigs.
This manual has been an extraordinary project, both for me and for Metrowerks. The credits at the back of this manual do not do justice to the many fine people who had a hand in it.
I especially want to thank Greg Galanos, President of Metrowerks. He recognized that there was a need for a new approach to PowerPlant. True to the company motto, he listened and he acted.
Greg Dow, PowerPlant's parent and chief designer, deserves special mention. He and the other fine engineers at Metrowerks have created a fantastic application framework. As you'll see when you delve into the inner workings of PowerPlant, this is a world-class piece of code. It is elegantly designed and beautifully realized. Greg's early design decisions made my job-explaining PowerPlant to you-easier, more fun, and more rewarding. I can promise you that his design will make your learning experience far more enjoyable as well. Best of all, his efforts in PowerPlant will allow you to write better, more reliable, and more powerful software.
Phil Bornstein and Avi Rappoport blazed a trail into the unknown by writing the first PowerPlant manual. Thanks!
Harold Ekstrom deserves praise both as an outstanding tech editor and code writer. Harold wrote most of the code in the exercises in this book. He is an experienced PowerPlant master, and another of the fine people who put this book together for you.
Eric Scouten, the Constructor constructor at Metrowerks, deserves thanks for answering those technical questions I came up with at odd hours. There is a lot of his expertise in these pages.
Last, but not least, there is the PowerPlant Dream Team.
I started writing this book on October 2, 1995. By one of those
curious twists of synchronicity that the universe occasionally
throws at us, Steve Jovanovic posted a note on comp.sys. mac.programmer.codewarrior on that very day. He asked if anyone might be interested in joining
him in an adventure-learning all about PowerPlant.
His note said, in part, "If you're interested in a close-knit, small group, with fast-paced results, in the tradition of the Macintosh Warrior zeal, let's do it!" I wrote to Steve and expressed an interest in testing this documentation out with the group. We thought we'd have 10 or 15 people-30 at the most. Neither of us had any idea what we had let ourselves in for.
Within two weeks there were more than 200 people in the self-styled Dream Team. It had a web site, several mail lists on different topics, and small teams of programmers all over the world exploring PowerPlant and sharing what they learned. They became my official beta testers. Every week I'd ship a couple of draft chapters to guide their exploration. Then I'd wait for the feedback. Boy, did I get feedback! They really took the word "zeal" to heart.
These people made hundreds of suggestions for improvements, both large and small. Sometimes it was just a misplaced comma. Other times, a casual suggestion would send me off for two hours of reorganizing and rewriting. They found a few flaws-happily not many. By far, most of the comments were not for mistakes in the manual, but for ways in which it could be better. Almost every one of those suggestions was applied to this book.
So, to the PowerPlant Dream Team-especially Steve Jovanovic who had the idea and Alex Tang for setting up the network sites-a tip of the author's hat. And a special thank you to those who were most prolific and consistent in providing invaluable, real-world user feedback: Bob Tucci, Richard Atwell, Alex Bangs, Carl Constantine, Jim Jarrett, Jim Van Peursem, and Peter Zeigler. These folks were my most prolific editors, but they were not alone. I had suggestions from dozens of people on four continents!
What you have in front of you, then, is better than it otherwise would have been. To the Dream Team, and to everyone else who had a hand in this book inside and outside of Metrowerks, I say a heartfelt thank you.
This book really is the product of the "Ahnold" ethic. I hope you have as much fun learning from it as I had writing it.
