About This Book

This chapter includes:

What you'll find in this guide

The Neutrino Programmer's Guide is intended for developers who are building applications that will run under the QNX Neutrino Realtime Operating System.


Note: Depending on the nature of your application and target platform, you may also need to refer to Building Embedded Systems. If you're using the Integrated Development Environment, see the IDE User's Guide. For a different perspective on programming in Neutrino, see Getting Started with QNX Neutrino: A Guide for Realtime Programmers.

This table may help you find what you need in the Programmer's Guide:

When you want to: Go to:
Get started with a “Hello, world!” program Compiling and Debugging
Get an overview of the Neutrino process model and scheduling methods Programming Overview
Create and terminate processes Processes
Understand the inaccuracies in times Tick, Tock: Understanding the Neutrino Microkernel's Concept of Time
Use native networking Transparent Distributed Processing Using Qnet
Learn about ISRs in Neutrino Writing an Interrupt Handler
Analyze and detect problems related to dynamic memory management Heap Analysis: Making Memory Errors a Thing of the Past
Deal with non-x86 issues (e.g. big-endian vs little-endian) Freedom from Hardware and Platform Dependencies
Understand our Makefile methodology Conventions for Recursive Makefiles and Directories
Find out how QNX Neutrino conforms to and extends POSIX POSIX Conformance
Learn how to use the GDB debugger Using GDB
Find out about using memory on ARM targets ARM Memory Management
Find out about advanced Qnet topics Advanced Qnet Topics
Look up terms used in the Neutrino documentation Glossary

Note: We assume that you've already installed Neutrino and that you're familiar with its architecture. For a detailed overview, see the System Architecture manual.

Recommended reading

For the most part, the information that's documented in the Programmer's Guide is specific to QNX. For more general information, we recommend the following books:

Threads:

TCP/IP programming (note that some of the advanced API features mentioned in the following books might not be supported):

Typographical conventions

Throughout this manual, we use certain typographical conventions to distinguish technical terms. In general, the conventions we use conform to those found in IEEE POSIX publications. The following table summarizes our conventions:

Reference Example
Code examples if( stream == NULL )
Command options -lR
Commands make
Environment variables PATH
File and pathnames /dev/null
Function names exit()
Keyboard chords Ctrl-Alt-Delete
Keyboard input something you type
Keyboard keys Enter
Program output login:
Programming constants NULL
Programming data types unsigned short
Programming literals 0xFF, "message string"
Variable names stdin
User-interface components Cancel

We use an arrow (→) in directions for accessing menu items, like this:

You'll find the Other... menu item under Perspective-->Show View.

We use notes, cautions, and warnings to highlight important messages:


Note: Notes point out something important or useful.


Caution: Cautions tell you about commands or procedures that may have unwanted or undesirable side effects.


WARNING: Warnings tell you about commands or procedures that could be dangerous to your files, your hardware, or even yourself.

Note to Windows users

In our documentation, we use a forward slash (/) as a delimiter in all pathnames, including those pointing to Windows files.

We also generally follow POSIX/UNIX filesystem conventions.

Navigation buttons

At the top and bottom of our HTML docs, you'll see some or all of these buttons:

Use this button: To move:
Previous To the previous part of the document.
Contents “Up” in the document:
  • In a prose book, this typically takes you to About This Guide.
  • In a reference book, it takes you to the listing of items that start with a given letter. For example, if you're looking at the docs for abs(), this button takes you to the listing of the functions that start with A.
Keyword index To the keyword index.
Next To the next part of the document.

Technical support

To obtain technical support for any QNX product, visit the Support area on our website (www.qnx.com). You'll find a wide range of support options, including community forums.

Copyright © 2000–2012, QNX Software Systems Limited. All rights reserved.