Few months ago I started to work on a programming related book for AmigaOS4. As a side effect, some time before, I made a small article called "GDB For Beginners", which you can read on http://os4coding.net, here.

The purpose of the whole book will be to cover AmigaOS4 internals, kernel, disassembling and debugging techniques, ppc-assembler, utilities and tools which help when you debug programms and so on. In other words, the book will not be primarily aimed at application programmers, but more suited to low-level coders that are interested in driver stuff. Though, I hope, it will be interesting to read for other programmers who in interested in AmigaOS4 too.

The text of the book will be proof-read and fixed for grammar and the book will have respective images and diagrams to make it professional looking and interesting to read. The initial version will be done as a PDF, but a real paper version is planned of course (though, that depends).

For all of this, your help is needed if you want to see the book get finished.

Currently I will publish one more article: and this time not for beginners, but one that is more professional and covers a bit more detail, is good looking and interesting to read in comparison with the first one. It can be called an "example chapter", by which you can make an opinion about how book will be done.

The reason to publish that article is to see, if there is interest from aos4 user base to see full book to be done, and if publishing of this kind of articles in beetwen are intersting at all, or it waste of time. So, if you found all of this worthwise, make a donation, because by donations i can see if interest is real one or not. To add, to make book proffesionaly done, i need to spend money for proof-readers, for proffessional painters outside (becase amiga painters have no time mostly for making quality stuff in which they not involved directly).

Purposes of new article are to cover some areas which wasnt covers anythere else, nor in SDK, nor as 3d party tutorials, and that is:

-- Differences and internals of libc (newlib in our case)
-- Differences beetwen amigaos4 and unix from programming point of view
-- Internals of ELF format on amigaos4, parsing of elfs
-- Basics of GDB and objdump
-- Programming on assembler for amigaos4 in different ways
-- and all the other small bits here and here.


You can read the article online at os4coding.net HERE or download PDF version with all the examples HERE


I know, lately there was too much bountyes and asking for donations from different persons and different kind of projects, but that how it works: if you want everything progress faster, there is need to spend something for.

Currently, i do not create any bounty for book (what i will do later), but i just want to see if it even worth to worry. Planes to get starting donations in summs of 200$ (money will be spends beetwen me and Trixie (who do proof-reading and grammar corrections). Once we will reach 200, i will create a bounty which will exactly cover the book and all the stuff.

Bonty will be necessary as there will need some money for proof-readers and those who will fix english grammars, for graphics painters (to make some first/end pages), and as i say before, to make everything going fast, i mostly will recruit someone outside on the payment basics. There is already some work done, but sure it will be good to cover all by donations.

You also feel free to suggest the questions which will be covered in upcoming articles which can fits to the book later, if they will really worthwile to discuss deeply and worth to including to book of such kind. Plans are publish such kind of articles in meanwhile, while works on the book is ongoing.

At the end, big thanks going to Frank Wille with his never endles help, and to Trixie, who make a proof-read and gramar corrections.

Help us to make book reality, make a donation HERE

ps. i will post list of donars here, so everyone will see who do donations and how many, and once it reach starting summ, no more need it.