tonyshowoff
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There's no real book anymore, but there are people in the know who have contributed some information, but most of the work iWarg (the creator of Phoenix) did himself or gained from other projects.
The fact is that there were changes made over the years which were not reverse compatible, though largely with non-primary functionality like weather notifications, but also with buddy rights information and so on where the information was all position/length based, and that changed so much that in some cases it's vastly different from version to version. The underlying assumption was always people would be using the latest AIM client, but so long as older ones "just mostly worked" it was fine. This is hell on a project like Phoenix.
Ironically there was a way to deal with this (tool IDs, SNAC versioning was better, etc) in versions of AIM 3 or so and beyond, so the biggest messes are in the oldest versions. Third parties who documented and/or implemented the protocol did so with different versions so they all contradict each other or make different assumptions which are themselves not compatible.
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