 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | Suitable for anyone with a little C/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-understood code examples help make this text an excellent resource. (It also helps that Aaron Hillegass is a truly engaging writer.) He first explains how the legacy NeXTSTEP platform has evolved into Cocoa on the Mac OS X. Beginning 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 know 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 keeps beginners from getting lost in the details of Cocoa development, but gives the more advanced reader something more to do. While there are 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 yet, knows how to teach it to others. --Richard Dragan Topics covered: Brief history of the Mac platform (from NeXTSTEP to Mac OS X), basic Cocoa development in Objective-C, using Project Builder and Interface Builder tools, tutorial to Objective-C (instances, variables, using classes, arrays and other containers, custom classes), the Objective-C debugger, basic Cocoa controls (building user interfaces), tables and data sources, event handling and delegates, archiving documents (encoding and decoding, saving and loading documents), Nib files, window panels, saving and retrieving user defaults (including using dictionary classes), notifications (observers and more on delegates), alert panels, localization (including string tables, a English and French example, the nibtool utility), custom views and drawing, drawing images and mouse events (plus coordinates systems and autoscrolling views), responders and keyboard events, fonts and strings (including attributed strings and PDF support), pasteboards and nil-targeted actions, using Objective-C categories (a code reuse feature), drag-and-drop support, timers, sheets and drawers, formatting strings, printing support, on-the-fly menu updating, text editing with text views, basic tutorial for using Java with Cocoa, and custom Interface Builder palettes (and inspectors). |
Average Customer Rating:   Fantastic intro to Cocoa and Objective-C This is the book I started with to get into iPhone development. Even though this book is specific to Mac OS X desktop software development, it's by far the best book to get a solid foundation in Cocoa and Objective-C before learning the specifics in the iPhone SDK.
It took me about 80 hours to get through this book, doing all of the example programs. After that, it felt like I had taken a 5 credit course in college. This will teach you Xcode, Interface Builder, Cocoa, and Objective-C. Almost all the people at my last company that got into iPhone development said that this is *the* book to start with to get started, and I agree. Hillegass actually teaches a Cocoa class, and you can tell he is a great teacher from reading the book. You'll feel like you accomplished something cool after each chapter.
Before starting with the book, I already knew several other languages in-depth, notably Java, Perl, and some C. It may be a little too advanced for those without solid programming experience, and Objective-C looks very foreign to those who haven't used it before, but it's really not once you get used to it. Phenomenal Book This book is remarkable. I love how the author conveys how a Cocoa programmer would talk about or think about a code sample. You can tell the author has taught many students and knows what they need to hear in order to learn the point at hand. I'm a Ruby & Java programmer diving into Objective C, Cocoa, and iPhone programming. Great writing style, good pace, love it. Great beginner/intermediate learner book Really excellent book and has been recommended by numerous friends. I'm a 10+ year windows programmer, but decided to buy one of these fruit products and learn how to write and iPhone app. It's probably not the best for learning Objective C, but for learning how to code for the Apple or iPhone - this is really the best book I have found for getting started with Apple API's. Pick up a good book on Objective C, and then this one - your library will be complete for getting you going. If you need way more in-depth and complicated features of the OS, this might be a little too beginner, but it's great for beginners and will proudly occupy a good spot on my shelf.
Written by a guy from Big Nerd Ranch, I've gone to Big Nerd Ranch training seminars before - and their top-notch. Misleading Title Like many people, I bought this book as it has garnered much critical acclaim. Here is a quote from the back cover. "Covering the bulk of what you need to know to develop full featured applications for OS X, ........ it is an invaluable resource for any Mac programmer". One more quote from the Preface. "But it does cover probably 80% of what you need to know. You can find the remaining 20%, the 20% that is unique to you, in Apple's online documentation".
I would submit that these quotes are misleading and best. What this book should be titled, or subtitled is "A companion tutorial to Apple's online documentation", as you spend or will spend, if you are a novice, about 80% of your time going through the documentation, to find out, as another reviewer put it, what Hillegass is talking about. I would also take issue with the "covers 80% of what you need to know". If he means by this that he mentions 80% of what is in Cocoa, perhaps he is correct. But in order to understand comprehensively the 80% he talks about **very superficially**, you once again have to dive into the documentation.
Now having said that, if the book was presented as such, I would be far more inclined to give it a higher rating as it does at least let you know what is available.
I am sure Hillegass is a very nice person, but he should have faith that just as many would buy his book if the book was presented as such. Fantastic book! I haven't finished it yet but I'm loving this book. It's extremely easy to read and follow along without getting lost. The author writes in somewhat of a conversational style, as opposed to a highly technical and analytical fashion. In the interest of concentrating on 1 idea/topic at a time he often will say something like "this idea is known as ________, but it's not important right now and we'll read about it in Chapter __". I think this is a good thing; trying to learn a concept and then branching off onto smaller tangents would make it hard to learn the language.
This was my first time learning a computer language from a book. For this book, I'd recommend having a basic understanding of object oriented languages. I've had minor experience with Java, and pretty extensive experience with C/C++ and that was plenty of preparation for me. A lot of concepts with Objective-C (used in Cocoa) are extremely similar to those seen in C/C++, but with different syntax and keywords. Because of this, Aaron will often teach concepts in Objective-C and relate the functionality to Java or C/C++ concepts in order to solidify his explanation. For me that helps a lot because some concepts are hard to grasp for the first time.
I'm extremely satisfied with this book. I did research before I bought it and I think it paid off. Fun fact-- I've got a friend that works at Apple and he was attending WWDC '09, and he saw Aaron Hillegass cruising around the convention in his cowboy hat. I thought that was be pretty neat seeing as Aaron is a bit of a celebrity in the Mac community :) |  |
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