In 1988, Dan Gookin and I followed up our first Apple IIGS programming book with something more ambitious: Advanced Programming Techniques for the Apple IIGS Toolbox. While this book had fewer pages (415 in comparison to Mastering the Apple IIGS Toolbox’s 642 pages), it was a much more challenging project.
Unlike our previous book, which focused on foundational programming concepts for the IIGS, this one dived deeper into the Apple IIGS Toolbox—Apple’s collection of system routines that powered the graphical user interface and event-driven programming model. To make the content accessible to a broad audience, we provided every example in C, Pascal, and 65816 assembly language. This meant triple the effort in coding, testing, and debugging, not to mention ensuring that all examples functioned consistently across different languages.
Despite the complexity, the project was incredibly rewarding. The Apple IIGS was an innovative machine for its time, bringing the Mac-like experience to Apple’s 16-bit line, and we wanted to equip programmers with the tools to unlock its full potential.
Looking back, writing this book was an intense but satisfying challenge—one that pushed both our technical skills and our ability to explain advanced concepts clearly. If you were coding for the IIGS back in the day, you probably had a copy on your shelf!