Hi, I'm familiar to code in Windows environment. For some of our products, users are continuously asking for porting to Linux and Mac. To begin, I need a collection of documentation on the system APIs, how to use them, when to use them etc. documentation.
So, is there Is there any MSDN equivalent for Mac OS and Linux? Preferably in a downloadable format?
PS. I'd like to work on Free Pascal/Lazarus or RealBasic.
For Mac, the developer site on developer.apple.com is great. It provides detailed documentation for all of the APIs in an easily searchable and readable format. The documentation is also bundled with XCode, so you don't even need to download it.
Well if you get Apple's XCode, you can download all sorts of documentation, tutorials, etc right from within Xcode. Or try the Apple Developer Connection for forums and anything else you can't find links to for in Xcode.
On Linux, you're more forced to individual package websites and man pages unfortunately.
For Linux one place is the Linux Developer Network.
Things I have liked,
For Linux, the equivalent is man pages, which are usually part of the distribution, but the development man pages may be in a separate package which isn't part of the default distribution. You access them with the 'man' command.
The Linux man-pages project is a useful reference for the system APIs. However, a lot of the time you will be using higher-level libraries; each one has its own documentation.
Man pages, and in cases where that doesn't work, the sources. The FPC unix RTL was developed that way.
One of the most common gotchas is the difference between kernel and libc versions of structs.