Re: Any new/updated Cocoa books soon?
Re: Any new/updated Cocoa books soon?
- Subject: Re: Any new/updated Cocoa books soon?
- From: Patrick Machielse <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 25 Jan 2004 19:34:40 +0100
op 25-01-2004 02:24 schreef Don Yacktman
>
I think to some degree it's up to Sams. I'm not sure Sams is
>
interested or willing to print an update. What I can say for sure is
>
that Sams hasn't come to me *recently* asking for an update. That
>
could change at any time, though, I suppose. They don't seem to have
>
written off the Mac Programming market altogether yet at least. Still,
>
I can't say that sales for the book have been exactly stellar, so it
>
isn't like they have a lot of motivation to incur the costs of
>
producing a second edition.
Maybe you could reignite sales by renaming the book to "Cocoa Programming,
the missing manual"...
>
If I could afford to take the time off, I'd update Cocoa Programming
>
and actually write a follow up book that covered _advanced_ Cocoa
>
techniques. The book we published is only about 2/3 of what was in the
>
original outline. We literally ran out of space. We went all the way
>
up to the binder's limit! And with all the new stuff from Apple, I'm
>
pretty sure I could at least double that trimmed material. There's
>
enough material left that could be covered that I believe another book
>
the size of Cocoa Programming could be created.
Don, (and Erik, and Scott)
I hope you win the lottery real soon so you can devote your waking hours to
writing again (you do play?). I must say that I don't agree with Scott when
(if) he says that Apple documentation can replace third party books.
Although Apple documentation is _very_ welcome (keep up the good work) in a
sense it would be like living in a world without journalism, where you would
have to rely soly on government press releases ;-)
What I would like to see happen is not really a single book about Cocoa,
which isn't really a feasible goal as you indicate, but a series about
programming in Cocoa. I always liked what 'Sunsoft Press' did with their
books on Java. In a similar vain the following Cocoa titles would be
welcome:
* Core Cocoa, Fundamentals
* Core Cocoa, Advanced Features
* Cocoa Design Patterns (already in production)
* Cocoa Programming with Objective C and Java.
* Cocoa Graphics
Each book would be 300 - 400 pages of focussed information, and could be
updated in a 2, 3, or more year cycle depending on the developments in that
area. As an added bonus you would create some sort of 'momentum' by having
new releases / editions at more or less regular intervals.
I suspect Erik's book is really a step in this direction, taking a chapter
from Cocoa Programming and developing it.
I guess some involvement of Apple would be welcome, because this wouldn't
immediately be a profitable undertaking... However, Apple's present stance
on _print_ isn't really clear to me. A while ago I tried to purchase a
printed copy of the 'Obj-C.pdf', but it seems that it's no longer available.
I think David Pogue proved that there is indeed a market for printed end
user documentation. I suspect there would be one for books targeted at
programmers too.
Still things could be worse. Imagine looking for a book on Carbon
programming :-(
Patrick
--
Hieper Software
w: www.hieper.nl
e: email@hidden
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