RISC OS System Programming Book

Raspberry Pi RISC OS System Programming Revealed (The Book) is now available on Amazon.
My website will be updated with all relevant info by the weekend, but for those of you who might be interested now you can see details at:
Amazon UK
Amazon USA

If you are able – please spread the word to make this a viable project.
Many thanks for all those via ROOL who have helped with answers and feedback. I will update further at the weekend.
Regards, Bruce

Hi Bruce,

I plan to buy a copy, are there any plans to produce a Kindle version? (Handy for reading on the train)

Regards
Bob

If you are able – please spread the word to make this a variable project.

s/ variable/ viable
:-|

@Bob: No plans at present – I am not sure it would work that well as an eBook due to formatting issues and the relative complexity of some of the tables etc.

No problem Bruce, I received the book from Amazon yesterday and so far it’s proving to be a very good read!

Ditto – just ordered a copy.

RISC OS needs good documentation if its going to ‘rise back from the dead’ and become a mainstream operating system once again, so well done to Bruce for jumping (back) onto the RISC OS roller coaster ride and writing these new books …

In many ways RISC OS is the perfect OS for the RPi, and deserves to get more widely used.

Ralph

@Bob and @Ralph – Thanks very much gents, agree with you so please spread the word as and when you can! Would really help if you can get anyone who gets a copy to write a small review on Amazon and encourage others to get a copy. This is not to make me a fortune (It would need to sell and awful lot of copies to do that) but to make it a viable proposition to produce a follow up.

If folks start seeing RISC OS books out there and available they will start to think “RISC OS” and look further, and hopefully move towards identifying it as you say @Ralph the perfect OS for the RPi!

Confusingly, for “RISC OS System Programming Revealed”, you are “Mr. Bruce Smith”, while for your other two Pi books, you are “Bruce Smith”.

Thanks for pointing that out @Steffen – I’ll have to email Amazon to get it changed.
Also, thanks for the review – Google Translator came in handy. Much appreciated.

@Bruce thanks for writing a RISC OS book in the first place! Much appreciated. Had a good time reading it.

Hi, just put my order in. I’d like to start using Risc OS again after a long time away. Fortunately I’ve got a lot of spare time coming up over the summer so I’d really like to get involved with some Risc OS development in some way. Whether it’s app development or something lower-level. And this book looks like an ideal starting point. Thanks.

Peter, are you within reach of a local user group?

Hi Trevor. Actually, I’m not all that far from the Wakefield group. I was thinking about popping over to a meeting at some point. I’m certainly planning to attend the show in April.

Welcome back Peter:-)
It sounds like you’ve done some RISC OS bits before. What sort of things was it?
Do you have experience or interest in particular areas?

Hi Chris. Well, from what I remember, I think there were a couple of graphics demos and a 3D object designer or something like that, on an A3000. Most of it was in BASIC and C, but I covered some RISC assembly as well. Experience-wise, mainly graphics, physics and networking.

I don’t have a problem with the PRMs – been using the hard copy version for years and of course have the Pi version on my Pi. Will this tell me anything they don’t, Pi specific stuff or anything? £16.89 isn’t a trivial amount for me (I’m a pensioner) but it’s not beyond the pale if it’ll be useful.
My particular interest at the moment is keyboard handlers, about which there’s precious little in the PRMs. I’m used to !IKHG, but its products don’t work on RiscOS 5.2 as far as I can see. I’ve been looking online for anything and so far found nothing useful.

I think it’s fair to say that most of what’s in the book is in the PRMs, though there are sections where the PRMs haven’t been updated and the book has newer information. There are some Pi specific parts described (like how to use the GPIO).

If you know the PRMs back to front you might find a lot you’re already familiar with. The target audience is more intended for those who are daunted by thousands of pages of documentation and don’t know where to start.

There’s nothing on keyboard handlers from what I remember. You’re probably better off starting a thread here. IIRC everything changed quite substantially with Unicode-isation but I don’t recall any documentation on the subject.

“…everything changed quite substantially with Unicode-isation…”
That’s what I suspected!
“…I don’t recall any documentation on the subject…”
I’ve certainly not found any! I’ve found a few enigmatic comments – such as that the new keyboard driver doesn’t really need a replacement !IKHG because the tables are supposed to be human-readable – but where are they? I’ve scanned right through the “ROM” image etc. (in !Boot.Loader) and found nowt – a few chunks of data that look suspiciously much as though they could be keyboard translation tables, but certainly not “human-readable” ones. No relevant files on the disc image, either, as far as I can see.
But yes, I’ll start a proper thread here. I wish I’d been around at the time of “Unicode-isation” – I’m an opinionated git about UTF-8 etc. 8~)