Re: Cocoa Books (was New to Cocoa)
Re: Cocoa Books (was New to Cocoa)
- Subject: Re: Cocoa Books (was New to Cocoa)
- From: Bill Cheeseman <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2002 16:48:47 -0400
on 02-10-11 3:12 PM, Aaron Hillegass at email@hidden wrote:
>
The question of Cocoa books is one that is near to my heart, and there
>
have been some new developments, so I'd like to weigh in on this
>
question.
Chiming in on the same theme, my Peachpit Press book "Cocoa Recipes for Mac
OS X: The Vermont Recipes" will be published in November. You can get a
foretaste of it by looking at Vermont Recipes on the Stepwise site (the URL
is below). It has the first 5 of 21 recipes, though currently in somewhat
obsolete form (in terms of the developer tools discussions). The book is
about 750 pages, including updated versions of what you can see now on the
Stepwise site.
My book differs from the others in several ways, including these:
1. It is based throughout on a single application, so you learn a number of
useful techniques for organizing and writing code for a complete
application, as opposed to studying small examples geared to specific
features of Cocoa.
2. As the last to press of all the books Aaron listed, it's a little more up
to date -- a short-lived advantage, I'm sure. There is lots of discussion of
Jaguar features in the developer tools and the Cocoa frameworks, although I
do not go into new Jaguar features like Address Book and the accessibility
framework. I do cover keyed archiving in some depth, which to my mind is the
most important of the general-purpose new Cocoa features in Jaguar. (But you
don't have to buy my book for that, since the keyed archiving article has
already been posted on the Stepwise site.)
3. Although the first recipe (150 pages) is definitely for Cocoa beginners
and many of the others are easily understood by and useful to beginners,
there is also some pretty advanced stuff in the rest of the book. I walk you
through a complete on-the-fly telephone number formatter, for example, and a
technique for implementing "live" undo and redo of editing in text fields --
something that Cocoa can't do right, out of the box. My recipe on table
views is also advanced, although easily mastered.
4. Don't buy my book if what you're looking for is how to write graphics
code. And despite my very strong interest in AppleScript, there's nothing
significant regarding AppleScript in my book (although I did manage to work
one longish script into the text).
5. I do show you how to write Apple Help books and make them work right in
Cocoa. I also cover "Context Help," a little-known cocoa technology which
generates Help tags on steroids. (Did you ever press the Help key on your
keyboard while a Cocoa application is running and wonder why that big, fat
question mark cursor doesn't do anything? Buy my book, and you can make it
work the way it's supposed to work.)
6. The concluding recipe discusses how to deal with backward compatibility
issues when writing a Cocoa application for Jaguar.
7. At 750 pages, it's neither too light nor too heavy. The perfect
compromise, if you can't choose between the Anguish-Buck-Yacktmann book and
any of the others. :-) Seriously, my completely unbiased view is that any
aspiring Cocoa developer needs (1) at least one of the existing shorter
books (although I find all of them helpful), (2) my book, and (3) the
Anguish-Buck-Yacktmann book. No choices to make -- just buy all of them.
Aaron is undoubtedly right: you can't get rich writing Cocoa books. Maybe
not reading them, either. But I think we will all agree that it's a lot of
fun!
Apologies for going on at such length.
--
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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