Re: Vermont Recipes vs Building Cocoa Applications
Re: Vermont Recipes vs Building Cocoa Applications
- Subject: Re: Vermont Recipes vs Building Cocoa Applications
- From: Bill Cheeseman <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 17:54:25 -0500
on 02-11-26 1:38 PM, Jerry LeVan at email@hidden wrote:
>
I can't seem to find much in reviews for the Vermont Recipes book. Any
>
reason to buy one of the two books in the subject field over the other?
As the author of Vermont Recipes, I will try to stick to fact and avoid
opinion as much as possible. I will say, however, that I thought BCA was
good. I like to think mine is, too, so I won't suggest quality as a basis
for distinguishing between them. Mine hasn't been out long enough to
generate reviews.
Both books are longer and denser than Hillegass, which is also a good book
but, at 400- pages, necessarily somewhat more introductory than mine (750
pages) or BCA (600+ pages). While both books are much shorter than
Anguish-Buck-Yacktman (1,200+ pages), both take a much more hands-on-coding
approach.
It is a mistake to describe either Vermont Recipes or BCA as strictly for
beginners. They both start out assuming the reader is a Cocoa beginner but
has some knowledge of programming, object-oriented concepts, and the C
programming language. But both get into more advanced material (some of it
much more advanced) after the first 200 pages or so. So both are useful to
take you beyond Hillegass.
I would say that all four are important parts of a Cocoa programmer's
library. Hillegass is a great introduction to the subject.
Anguish-Buck-Yacktman is a great reference book, plus the only in-print book
on the innards of the Objective-C runtime. Vermont Recipes and BCA fill the
middle ground, and there are enough differences between them in scope and
coverage that you won't be bored reading both of them.
I will mention a few differences that struck me while I was reading BCA. The
authors of BCA can jump in if I've left out any important points.
1. BCA is the second iteration of their book, after their 1990 volume about
Cocoa's predecessor, NeXTStep. This has both advantages and disadvantages.
Among the former is the fact that they've been at this much longer than I
have. Among the latter, I felt there was a tendency in BCA to rely on what
they had written before and therefore less coverage of some of the newer
stuff added to NeXTStep and OpenStep over the years and especially to Cocoa
since Apple bought NeXT. (For examples, see #3, below.)
2. My book is slightly more recent, allowing me to cover material relevant
to Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, while BCA stops at 10.1. Neither book goes into the
new topical Objective-C classes in Jaguar (Address Book, Disc Recording).
But I do cover keyed archiving in Recipe 12, which I think is the most
important of the new Cocoa technologies in Jaguar -- if you're writing for
Jaguar and later, you really have to implement keyed archiving. And I
conclude with a chapter on backward compatibility issues (running apps
compiled under 10.2 on 10.1 and 10.0) that isn't discussed anywhere else at
this time.
3. There are enough differences in coverage between them that it wouldn't be
a mistake to buy both. For example, I cover user controls in greater detail,
with particularly strong treatment of NSComboBox and NSTableView. I also
have chapters devoted to topics not covered in depth or at all in BCA such
as tab views, drawers, formatters, contextual menus, Dock menus, context
help (tooltips on steroids), and Apple Help. I'm particularly proud of my
chapter on implementing "live" undo and redo while editing text fields, a
feature that Cocoa doesn't provide and that I haven't seen covered anywhere
else. Contrariwise, BCA has chapters on topics I don't touch, such as simple
applications without documents, Darwin, and 100+ pages on graphics. Both
books include coverage of common topics, of course, such as document-based
applications, and preferences and user defaults.
I haven't mentioned the second edition of Learning Cocoa, which I have also
found useful. It's sort of in a class by itself, being an update and
reorganization of a number of Apple examples and texts.
--
Bill Cheeseman - email@hidden
Quechee Software, Quechee, Vermont, USA
http://www.quecheesoftware.com
The AppleScript Sourcebook -
http://www.AppleScriptSourcebook.com
Vermont Recipes -
http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/VermontRecipes
Croquet Club of Vermont -
http://members.valley.net/croquetvermont
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