Cocoa: Programming for OS X |
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Aaron Hillegass
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Pages: 480 (Paperback)
ISBN: 0321213149
Pub: Addison Wesley
Pub date: 2004-05-13
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 104520
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:
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.
Excellent Start to Mac OS X Programming (0/0 people found this helpful)
This is an excellent book that covers the basics to Cocoa programming, showing you how to make a basic Cocoa program and get going. Although I quickly got the hang of the basics of Cocoa I still use it heavily as a reference along with Apples official Cocoa documentation. As has been mentioned it was written for Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) but is still totally compatible with Tiger (10.4). The only major thing the book does fail to cover is Core Data which was released with Tiger, but Apple has an excellent tutorial for that which is completely compatible with this book.
Quickest way to become a decent Mac programmer (1/1 people found this helpful)
The best part is that it's full of really useful Cocoa-specific programming patterns/best practices. You can tell that author of this book has experience with Cocoa since it even wasn't called Cocoa yet :)
Book has been written for Panther (10.3), but in Tiger (10.4) everything works exactly as described (all is still up-to date, I haven't found a single deprecated method in this book).
It has useful examples that are very close to the real-world applications and it teaches how to write a proper, well-behaved Mac applications with drag'n'drop, localization, per-user settings, ubiquitous undo, AppleScript, etc.
Absolutely Fantastic (1/1 people found this helpful)
This book has to be the best introduction to Cocoa programming I have found, the book has clear structure and explains everything in an interesting, no nonsense fashion.
You must already know C/C++ to use this book, which was a great plus for me, as alot of the other books waisted several chapters on introducing basic programming topics. If you don't know C or C++ then I recommend reading a beginners Objective C book or tutorial, such as the one on Apple's Website.
The book walks you through several small projects which introduce key concepts and design procedures in Cocoa, at the end of each chapter you are given additional tasks, e.g. Adding additional preferences to a window, etc. Once you have read through the book you will have good understanding of how a Cocoa program is created, and how all the components fit together.
Once you have finished the book, you will be able to create simple programs, and move on to the more advanced topics and guides, specifically the excellent documentation on Apple's Website.
If I have one complaint about the book, it is the lack of any information about creating Toolbars, although a quick search on the Internet will reveal how to do this.
I thoroughly recommend this book for anyone interesting in learning Cocoa
Fine introduction to Cocoa, now updated for Xcode (4/4 people found this helpful)
I can echo the positive comments of other reviewers and would just add that the 2nd edition (summer 2004) is even better because it is based on Panther and Xcode throughout. This gives it an edge over the other introductory books, which at present are I believe all based on the earlier development environment (ProjectBuilder). For a beginner like me it is helpful if the screenshots show the application you are actually using!
Mr Hillegass writes well, and his experience in running training courses shows through clearly.
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