Re: *That* book
Re: *That* book
- Subject: Re: *That* book
- From: Ken Tabb <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 18:31:43 +0100
And so it was that Peter Sichel said on 12/9/01 3:42 pm:
>
Compared to a masterpiece like "The C Programming Language" by
>
K&R, "Learning Cocoa" is too limited and frustrating.
I agree with the concensus: it's buggy and a bit vague in places, but
it's all we've got (so far) besides the Obj-C PDF (which doesn't explain
Cocoa, just Objective-C). However the comparison of Learning Cocoa to K&R
is like comparing apples & pears: K&R is a book about the C *language*
and Learning Cocoa is a book about the Cocoa *API*. APIs are by their
very nature, vague in terms of what you can do with them (as you build
from the API objects). Languages are much more defined in terms of what
you can do with them. As such a language is more limited in scope, and
finalised, than an API... you could expect a book on a language to show
every possible way of creating and deleting instances of objects
(assuming the book is about an OO language 8^). You couldn't expect an
API book to show every possible use of an NSView, as that's kind of up to
the developer, not the person making an API. All they could show is a
couple of (in their opinion) common / useful examples of it in action,
and hope that the reader grasps enough from the examples that they
realise what else you could do with the object. Whether or not they put
(a) any, (b) enough, (c) relevant and (d) correct examples in the book is
up to the writers, of course. Depending on what you already know, and
what you want to do with Cocoa, you can pretty quickly point to bits
where a, b, c and d are lacking in the 'Learning Cocoa' book. As another
lister commented, there is an online errata page however, for the
instances of 'd'.
I'm not saying that K&R isn't brilliant, or that Learning Cocoa is
brilliant, but I just think you're not comparing like with like to
compare a language book and an API book. API books (the ones I've read at
least) are much more woolly, not least because more often than not the
API is evolving, whereas the language is 'finished'. After all in 10.1
Apple will publish an Obj-C API for QuickTime. No that last bit's not
true (I expect), I'm just hoping that by rumour-mongering then Apple will
get the hint!
Personally I found the Obj-C PDF very very good as a ref for Obj-C. But
as I say, it doesn't do (very much) Cocoa.
Looking forward to the 'Accessing QuickTime from Cocoa without having to
use Carbon' book, just as soon as they've written the API to go with it
8^)
Just my 1.3 pence,
Ken
----------------------------------------------
Ken Tabb
Mac & UNIX Propellerhead & Network Bloke (Health & Human Sciences)
Computer Vision / Neural Network researcher (Computer Science)
University of Hertfordshire
e-mail: email@hidden
http://www.health.herts.ac.uk/ken/
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