I thought the book was an excellent introduction to programming the BeOS. The book focuses on the essentials, particularly of the interface kit, and provides an efficient means of becoming familiar with the API. The book clearly demonstrates the elagance of the BeOS API.

I was concerned about the references to the CDROM, but I'm sure those will be corrected in the second edition. I just downloaded the code from the "Examples" page on the O'Reilly site. I'd take this book with some minor errors over not having a hard copy intro to BeOS programming any day.