Current and Planned Courses

The primary focus of The MOST is to produce and support self-study materials on MacOS technologies and the languages/development tools that are used for MacOS development. Each set of these materials constitutes a course. A MOST course provides the motivated student with access to:

a course "textbook"
example code
pointers to related materials
one or more course mentors to help with areas of difficulty

See the "How to Take a Course" page of the web site for additional information on how to use our site and services to assist you with your study efforts.

The MOST is growing, though ever so slowly. We began our first group study exercize on June 17th 1996, using the "Mac C" course materials that had been previously produced by K.J. Bricknell for an independent effort. More recently, K.J. utilized the class notes and questions/answers pages that were produced for each lesson in this course as we proceeded through the pilot class to assist him in producing his most recent update to the text.

We will be improving our existing courses and adding courses as we find people to help perform the associated tasks. This has been a slow process lately, so many of the below courses may never actually materialize. If you'd like to HELP change that (as opposed to just complaining about it), please see the appropriate section of the FAQ for details of what you can do to help create a course.

Select a course from the list below to see where we are at this point in having materials ready for it, to access the materials that ARE ready, or to find out how to enroll in that course if it's ready for public use. Links which aren't yet active indicate courses that have not progressed beyond the conceptualization stage or are currently being reworked.

Fundamentals.
- Binary, Hex, and Boolean. A to-be-produced course which will provide the fundamentals of working with binary and hexadecimal numbers, including conversions between all appropriate bases, signed and unsigned values, the rules for arithmetic and logical operations, an explanation of ASCII encoding, and an explanation of the use of masks.
- Computer Hardware. A to-be-produced course which will explain the fundamentals of computer systems, including processor specs, I/O devices, RAM, and information about common peripherals.
- Software Fundamentals. A to-be-produced course which will provide the fundamentals of programming including data types, arithmetic, logical, & string operations, file I/O, functions & libraries, and software development terminology.
- Fundamental Mac Programming Concepts . A high level overview of the concepts one must understand to start Mac programming. A crude initial version has been produced and we are soliciting critiques to allow us to improve it. This course will be broken down to serve as the starting point for the above three base courses.... eventually.... when we get to it.
Languages. Courses on languages used for Mac OS development.
- Essence of C . An overview of the C language produced by K.J. Bricknell as an introduction/refresher to the C programming language.
- MOST Java? . Some members have suggested such a course, but none of our currently active mentors consider ourselves qualified (or have the time) to produce such a course. However, this seems like SUCH a natural that i suspect that we'll get to it eventually, so i'm saving its place :-).
Tools. Courses that explain the use of development tools and utilities.
- There are no courses in this category currently available.
Net. Courses that explain how to use the internet and the WWW.
- There are no courses in this category currently available.
Core. Courses that explain the basic Mac OS technologies and how to create standard Mac apps.
- MacOS Core Programming. Mentored, self-paced study of one of K.J. Bricknell's online books, either "MACINTOSH C:A Hobbyist's Guide to Programming the Macintosh in C" or the recent Pascal version (produced in collaboration with Koryn Grant).
MacOS Advanced. Courses that cover advanced (an admittedly arbitrary division) Mac OS programming issues and technologies.
- There are no courses in this category currently available.

Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998. Last Update to This Page: 1998/10/23
This Page Maintained by: radar pangaean * * * Original Author: radar pangaean
The MOST web site is built and maintained by the voluntary efforts/donations of our members.