Matthew's Journal

a) how to build a macos-app

If you mean an actual .app bundle, one that you can double-click on and that will show up in the dock and use a GUI, you'll pretty much need Xcode, I believe. But see the xcodebuild(1) man page.

A command-line tool, however, can be built in the usual way, and can use frameworks with the -framework linker flag.

b) where the CDROM headers are/ what the interface is like[1]

I don't know too much about this... what are you trying to do with the CDROM? I'll note here the existence of the DiskArbitration framework, and of cddafs.

Observation, and note to self: cddafs uses the CDDB track titles that iTunes downloads. Yow.

c) how to do network programming for OSX

The same as for BSD, pretty much. I should also note the existence of the SystemConfiguration framework, which is built on the BSD interfaces and used by the GUI network configurator.