Re: Potential O'Reilly Cocoa books (was Docs)
Re: Potential O'Reilly Cocoa books (was Docs)
- Subject: Re: Potential O'Reilly Cocoa books (was Docs)
- From: Ken Tabb <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 15:46:08 +0100
And so it was that Chuck Toporek said on 23/8/01 2:53 pm:
>
On another note, there does seem to be a serious amount of information
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pain going on here, and I'll agree that better documentation (be it free
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online docs or printed material) is needed. The big thing I'm seeing
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right now (at least in this thread) is that everyone seems to be digging
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for an API reference. Correct? If that's the case, is there anyone here
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on this list (Ondra?) who might be interested in writing a "Cocoa
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Foundation Classes" book? This can probably be built up from existing
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Apple documentation and expanded into something that's much more useful
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(and accessible) to everyone.
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>
Any takers?
>
>
Meantime, if there are other books you think we should be publishing,
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let me know.
Firstly, if I'm being picky, I think the title "Cocoa Foundation Classes"
would be a bit misleading if it covered anything outside Foundation (eg.
AppKit).
Secondly, I think it would be handy to have a book / resource which
discusses Accessing MacOS X Technologies in Cocoa (or thereabouts),
rather than the Learning Cocoa approach which is more an isolated "Here's
Obj-C and here's Cocoa"... good at what it does, but by it's very nature
(introductory text), limited.
What I mean is a book which covers that multicoloured layered diagram of
Steve Jobs keynotes (with Darwin / Core OS at the bottom, then Quartz /
QuickTime / OpenGL, then Classic / Carbon / Cocoa / Java, then Aqua
"Advanced Mac Look & Feel" sat on top). In other words a book with
chapters discussing, from a *Cocoa* programmer's point of view, how to
incorporate QuickTime, and / or OpenGL, and / or CoreAudio into your
Cocoa app. Similarly how to interface to hardware using IOKit, or
optimise your app's processor intensive code using AltiVec, or access the
BSD shell commands from within your app. There is currently nothing which
tells you how to do this (that I've found), except the 'Tasks and
Concepts' section of the AppKit API, which is mainly "Description
forthcoming" (in the bits I'm using, at least). If you're a Carbon
programmer, on the other hand, the world is your oyster (or so it
appears)... there's docs on everything.
As a side issue, there is very little Cocoa API for things like QuickTime
and OpenGL... you're basically given an NSMovieView or NSOpenGLView in
which to show your stuff onscreen, which gives you programmatically a way
of getting to (Carbon, not Cocoa) Movie structures or AGL structures. But
at the end of the day you're left doing Carbon API programming in a Cocoa
app. Clearly this presents a learning curve for Cocoa (or Object
Oriented) programmers, who may never have touched Carbon (or procedural
programming) before... neither the Carbon QuickTime API nor the Carbon
OpenGL / AGL API is object-oriented (this is so that C programmers can
use it). As such, the docs for NSMovie and NSMovieView assume you're
already familiar with QuickTime coding using Carbon, in a sort of "and
there you go, there's your carbon Movie structure complete with GWorlds"
manner... if that's the case, why would we be using Cocoa etc.?!! Maybe
this will all change in 10.1 (haven't received the beta yet), who knows?
Just some thoughts to help you become rich quickly - I can guarantee you
at least one sale of the book in the UK 8^)
Cheers,
the boy Ken
----------------------------------------------
Ken Tabb
Mac & UNIX Propellerhead & Network Bloke (Health & Human Sciences)
Computer Vision / Neural Network researcher (Computer Science)
University of Hertforfdshire
e-mail: email@hidden
http://www.health.herts.ac.uk/ken/
Certified non-Microsoft Solution Provider