$4.00 is too much to spend?

I have a physical copy of the pascal version, which I plan to eventually scan. But yes, the physical book is pretty cheap. I strongly encourage getting the actual thing to help preserve the dwindling copies that remain of old computer books.

Im also interested in learning more about how these old apps were programmed..... are those the core 2 languages involved? Pascal? and C++? would these be the languages used to write hardware drivers for usb devices? is there anyway to decompile + recompile a usb driver?

@megabyte: The book link you gave is for programming in (Think) C.

I think there is a good amount of documentation included on the CD for Symantic (Think) C/C++ 8.6 linked here at the MG. Includes the rather good "Think Reference" as well as compilers etc.

I'll check my server tonight or tomorrow to see if I have a PDF (doubt it though), but I bought copies of the Pascal and C versions of that book and they are awesome for getting into old-school Mac programming. IIRC the proper Think compiler versions are all here on the Garden. Highly recommended that you get physical copies.

+1 on the Think Reference too; it's amazing. Has all the API calls you'd really ever need in a SSW 7+ environment.

@supernova: The original Macintosh Toolbox was all designed to provide Pascal bindings, and Pascal was very popular in the 80s, but by the early 90s programming on the Mac was switching to C. The later Inside Macintosh books gave C, Pascal, and 68k Assembly versions of the API calls, but when using the C versions you had to watch out for Pascal style calling conventions and variables (like using Pascal strings). C++ got popular because you could wrap up your C code and object-orientify everything, and then there were major frameworks in C++ (later MacApp, PowerPlant, etc.). For drivers, IIRC a couple of the Inside Macintosh books discuss driver development. I don't know anything about that, but you'd probably be using C (maybe C++).

Edit: Replaced 'xxx 7' by 'SSW 7' - IIGS User