Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X |
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Aaron Hillegass
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Pages: 464 (Paperback)
ISBN: 0321503619
Pub: Addison Wesley
Pub date: 2008-05-15
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 2601
Editorial Review:
Suitable for anyone with a little C++ programming experience who wants to create software for the newest Mac platform, Cocoa Programming for Max OS X provides a slickly packaged and approachable tutorial that will get you started creating state-of-the-art Mac programs.
The smart presentation style and easy-to-understand code examples help make this text an excellent resource. It also helps that Hillegass is a truly engaging writer. He first explains how legacy NeXTSTEP platform has evolved into Cocoa on the Mac OS X. Starting with short examples illustrating the actual Cocoa tools in action, the author gets you started with simple programs for a random number generator, a raise calculator and other comprehensible examples. Rather than just listing APIs and classes, the emphasis is on hands-on Cocoa development. An early standout section provides a nice tour of essential Objective-C features you'll need to learn to use Cocoa effectively.
This book covers the several dozen built-in Cocoa controls, from basic text and buttons to more advanced widgets (including lists and tables). Subsequent sections look at user interface design (using the Interface Builder to create nib files) and how to add programmatic processing behind the visual layout. Along the way, the author introduces coverage of essential Cocoa APIs for strings, arrays and dictionaries. Later chapters look at saving and loading documents (and user defaults) and how to tap the powerful graphics abilities available in Cocoa. (Besides image and basic drawing, there are short sections on PDF support and printing.)
More advanced user interface features get their due by the end of the book, including cutting and pasting data through the Cocoa pasteboard and also adding drag-and-drop support. Final sections look at creating new controls for use with the Interface Builder palette, and, briefly, how to use Java with Cocoa (an option that the author doesn't necessarily recommend). Throughout this text, the author provides more advanced, challenging problems at the end of each chapter for the "more curious" reader. This approach helps that beginners will not get lost in the details of Cocoa development, but will give the more advanced reader something more to do.
While there a comparably fewer books on Mac OS X compared to other platforms, readers are lucky to have this one available. Anyone who wants to get onboard with Cocoa development will be well served by this title. It's a fine tutorial that earns high marks for its approachable, clear examples and an excellent presentation by an author who knows his stuff and, better still, knows how to teach it to others. --Richard Dragan
Reader Reviews:
Best book to start with! (1/1 people found this helpful)
Awesome book, very approachable. For anyone coming to Mac programming for the first time, this is the book to start with.
Not as scary as I thought. (2/2 people found this helpful)
I've had a project on the back burner for some time that required me to get to grips with Cocoa: no ifs, no buts. My timing wasn't ideal as XCode had gone from version 2 to version 3 without the documentation being updated, so I've been gingerly playing with Cocoa for about 5 months, but not really getting very far owing to the hurdles presented by the many interface changes.
Starting this book was nothing less than a revelation. I'm up to p77 of 418 pages and am surprised how quickly I'm getting to grips with tricky objective-c syntax (although it's really not too bad once you stop being scared of square brackets) and working with Interface Builder. The trickiest subject is memory management, and I must say I was rocking backwards and forwards gibbering 'this is hard, I'm not stupid' and clutching tightly to my degree certificate as Aaron recommends, but even this rather murky subject is beginning to sink in.
His writing style is very fluent and his many years of experience teaching people this technology is evident from the content. I'd shy away from saying this is a book for beginners, but if you've got a smattering of programming experience (PHP and a spot of Ruby is my background) and want to write good programs for the Rolls Royces of home computing, then this book has got to be at the top of your shopping list (assuming you've already bought a Mac that is! ).
Beware Xcode3 is here! (2/3 people found this helpful)
I've just bought the 2nd edition of this book (yellow cover) to save money. It seems to be a good book - clear and well laid out... BUT THERES A PROBLEM...
To use this book, you download Xcode3 tool from Apple.com (easy and free)
The 2nd Edition of the this book (Yellow cover) relates to Xcode2 and is badly out of date.. its not possible to follow the picture instructions since one of the key applications (interface builder) has completely changed.
So I would strongly advise to buy the 3rd Edition (grey/green cover)... even though its a packet more expensive... I guess this is the cost of evolution!
Unless of course you would like to buy my 2nd edition.. which I now can't use?? :D
The perfect starting point for learning Cocoa/Obj-C (1/1 people found this helpful)
As someone who made the switch to Macs/OS X just over 18-months ago, my interest in how the OS worked led me to buying this book. It's probably the best computer book I've bought full-stop.
This is THE BOOK you need to buy for a first-class authoritative introduction to Cocoa, the programming environment for OS X.
Very good (0/0 people found this helpful)
This is a very good book for a foundation in cocoa.
The author knows his stuff and history of the subject and writes in an easy to understand way.
Far better than the ADC book.
One note of warning is that Apple changed Interface Builder in XCode 3 so all the examples need slight re-working if you are going to be using XCode 3. This is a bit confusing to begin with but once you work out what you need to do differently it is not a problem.
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