About This Guide

This preface includes:

What you'll find in this guide
Typographical conventions
Technical support options

What you'll find in this guide

The QNX Neutrino Cookbook: Recipes for Programmers provides “recipes” that will help you understand how to design and write programs that run on QNX Neutrino. There's a separate archive of the source code for the programs that the book describes.

This book was originally written by Rob Krten in 2003. In 2011, QNX Software Systems bought the rights to the book; this edition has been updated by the staff at QNX Software Systems.

The following table may help you find information quickly:

To find out about:	Go to:
Brian Stecher's foreword	Foreword to the First Edition
Rob Krten's preface	Preface to the First Edition
Code that's common to all the recipes	The Basics
How to make your system highly available	High Availability
Designing a system that's based on message passing	Design Philosophy
Using a resource manager to implement a web counter	Web Counter Resource Manager
Writing a data-acquisition server	ADIOS — Analog/Digital I/O Server
Writing a basic filesystem	RAM-disk Filesystem
Writing a filesystem that manages `.tar` files	TAR Filesystem
Additional information about the basics of filesystems	Filesystems
Useful information that QNX Neutrino stores in `/proc`	The `/proc` Filesystem
Getting the source code discussed in this book	Sample Programs
Terms used in QNX docs	Glossary

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:

Notes point out something important or useful.

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

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.

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.