About 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
Manipulate the access control lists for files and directories	Working with ACLs
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 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.

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:

Butenhof, David R. 1997. Programming with POSIX Threads. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. ISBN 0-201-63392-2.

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

Hunt, Craig. 2002. TCP/IP Network Administration. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates. ISBN 0-596-00297-1.
Stevens, W. Richard. 1997. Unix Network Programming: Networking APIs: Sockets and XTI. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall PTR. ISBN 0-13-490012-X.
—. 1993. TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1 The Protocols. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. ISBN 0-201-63346-9.
—. 1995. TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 2 The Implementation. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. ISBN 0-201-63354-X.