Re: Hello, a book recommendation request, and a question
Re: Hello, a book recommendation request, and a question
- Subject: Re: Hello, a book recommendation request, and a question
- From: Doug Brown <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2002 18:08:01 -0700
On Tuesday, April 16, 2002, at 05:22 PM, cocoa-dev-
email@hidden wrote:
Greetings,
I'm very new to Cocoa development...like today new, having just
completed the Currency Conversion Tutorial that came with Apple's dev
tools.. =)
Great - Cocoa is a wonderful API and it does not take much time at all
to become quite proficient in it, especially with the books that have
been written for it.
I've been wanting to get back into programming for awhile now, and
wanting to do what I can to support and get more people using OS X, so
I've decided that Cocoa is the way I want to go, and now's the time to
do it.
So, in order to avoid berating you with very stupid questions, and
getting alot of RTFMs I'd like to get some opinions on what's are
actually good and useful books for me to get. I'm looking at two books,
currently, and was wondering if I should go with either, both, or some
other book I haven't come across as yet. Specifically O'Reilly's
"Learning Cocoa" and Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (by Aaron
Hillegas). They get alot of nice words said about them on Amazon, but I
figured I'd get a second opinion here as well. Would getting both of
them be pointless, and if so, which would be the better reference in the
long run?
Both the books are good, but the edge goes to Cocoa Programming for Mac
OS X. I read Learning Cocoa first (it came out first) and I was yearning
for more tutorials. At the time, the documentation for the classes was
pretty bad, and it's been improving and is getting much better. I learn
programming better by doing hands-on tutorials, and the books both have
wonderful tutorials, but again, Hillegass's book is better. First of
all, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X goes into many more topics than
Learning Cocoa. It assumes a better understanding of programming and
doesn't go into some of the smaller topics with as much detail as
Learning Cocoa, IMO. But if you read the guide to Object Oriented
Programming in /Developer/Documentation, you should be good to go.
Another thing I like are the challenges at the end of every chapter of
Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. It really helps me try to put what I've
learned to use, without copying code from the book. I find that when I
actually do something without copying it out of the book, it helps me
understand the topic better. The two books do have a lot of overlap
towards the beginning, but in the middle and the end, the Hillegass book
definitely covers *many* more topics.
And the other question, is there any place where there are some
guidelines for secure coding in Cocoa? Would normal C guidelines be
appropriate, or are there special things I need to be on the lookout
for?
Sorry, I don't know about this. :-(
Doug
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