Notes on the Inside Macintosh books: This series of book is a very comprehensive collection of technical programming notes for the Macintosh. They are not absolutely quintessential to help you program for the Macintosh, but I'd say they are a handy reference, if only to learn about the philosophy behind the inner workings of the Macintosh computer. There has been several editions and formats for these collections of books:

Free form on website:Apple provides the most up-to-date version freely on its website, as a fairly large collection of links to the full HTML-formatted books titled as Mac OS 8 and 9 Developper Documentation. The drawback with this source is that many antiquated System 6-7 technologies are no longer supported in there, and you have to dig a bit to extract the information that could pertain to System 6-7. This is why I've personally sought the old 1985 edition of the books on the net (Amazon and Half.com), to ensure I'd have pertinent information.

The old mid-80's editions: This is what I personally favored, as it's nice to read this pertinent information away from the glare of a computer monitor. The series back then organized the information in a different way than can be seen in the Apple website link above:
Book I, II, III: They all pertain to the very olden Mac 128k and Mac 512k. The information herein is still useful for most 68k macs because the system managers' core philosophy did not change.
Book IV: This one contains information on all the new features of the Macintosh Plus.
Book V and onward: The books at this point offer info related to color macs (Mac II series and onward), System 7 and everything else that followed. They are not necessary to program on a Mac Plus System 6 setting.

First 3 volumes combined together in hardcover format-
(1985) ISBN: 0201177374
Volume IV- (1986+) UPC: 9780201054095, ISBN: 0201054094
Both were publish by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.

Last Update: 2.21.04