>Bruce F. Webster in BYTE in December 1985 described Inside Macintosh as "infamous, expensive, and obscure", but "for anyone wanting to do much with the Mac ... the only real [printed] source of information". He quoted Kathe Spracklen, developer of Sargon, as saying that the book "consists of 25 chapters, each of which requires that you understand the other 24 before reading it". "The best guide to the Mac's ROMs is Inside Macintosh", Robert C. Platt said in August 1985. "Unfortunately, Inside Macintosh is also the most incomprehensible documentation ever written".

A reason why it was so infamous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh#1984.E2.80.9390:_Des... :

>Developers were required to learn how to write software that used the Macintosh's graphic user interface; despite standardizing on Pascal for software development Apple did not release a native-code Pascal compiler. Until third-party Pascal compilers appeared, developers had to write software in other languages while still learning enough Pascal to understand Inside Macintosh.

As a result,

>Although outselling every other computer, it did not meet expectations during the first year, especially among business customers. Only about ten applications including MacWrite and MacPaint were widely available ... After one year, [the Mac] had less than one quarter of the software selection available compared to the IBM PC—including only one word processor, two databases, and one spreadsheet—although Apple had sold 280,000 Macintoshes compared to IBM's first year sales of fewer than 100,000 PCs.