Ha, I remember those big books. The Waite Group's "Microsoft C Bible" (by Nabajyoti Barkakati - my uncle brought it for me as a present on one of his visits), and many others ...
In those days many of those topics were new - being the early-ish days of the PC revolution - and Internet (and hence online docs) was less prevalent, so those books served a real need, despite the size. I remember reading the Turbo Pascal manual cover to cover, the DOS Tech Ref manual and many others too. Calling the DOS equivalent of Unix system calls (i.e. interrupt 21H calls) and so on, from TP, TC and sometimes assembly - using just DEBUG.EXE's A (Assemble) command. Good fun and learning ...
In those days many of those topics were new - being the early-ish days of the PC revolution - and Internet (and hence online docs) was less prevalent, so those books served a real need, despite the size. I remember reading the Turbo Pascal manual cover to cover, the DOS Tech Ref manual and many others too. Calling the DOS equivalent of Unix system calls (i.e. interrupt 21H calls) and so on, from TP, TC and sometimes assembly - using just DEBUG.EXE's A (Assemble) command. Good fun and learning ...