introduction.md

Introduction

Welcome to the Haiku Book.

This is based off the original Be Book, updated with changes introduced in Haiku, and overall improvements and clarifications to the original documentation.

What is the Haiku Book?

The Haiku Book details the Application Programming Interface (API) to the Haiku(r) operating system.

Organization of This Document

This document is split into three parts:

System Overview

: Provides an overview of the functionality provided by the System, broken down into Kits. This should show you how the various classes interact with each other to produce the complete system.

Classes and Methods

: Details the classes/methods, what they do, which parameters you need to pass, the values they return, etc.

Special Topics

: Details needed to program various parts of Haiku not covered under the kits, e.g. how to create add-ons for the Tracker, create device drivers, etc.

Conventions Used in This Document

The following conventions are used in this book:

- Class names are shown as {nc}`classname`.
- Method names are shown as methodname().
- Function names are shown as function().
- Method and function parameters are shown as parameter.
- Types as type.
- Constants as constant.
- Variable names are shown as name.
- Keys are shown as keyname.
- Key combinations are shown as {key}`key1`+{key}`key2`, which means you should press the indicated keys at the
  same time.
- Filenames are shown as filename.