Cocoa Books (was New to Cocoa)
Cocoa Books (was New to Cocoa)
- Subject: Cocoa Books (was New to Cocoa)
- From: Aaron Hillegass <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2002 15:12:34 -0400
Hello,
I just recently decided to start developing on Mac so I am
wondering where I should start. Is there a book I could buy (Learning
Cocoa w/ Obj-C
maybe?)?
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.
First off, no one is getting rich writing Cocoa books. An author of a
computer book gets about $3 per copy sold, and the Cocoa community is
not huge (I doubt that any of us will sell even 15,000 copies.)
Writing a book is a lot of work. You do it to sell something else
and/or for the good of the community. So, I am extremely grateful to
all the authors who have taken the time to write a Cocoa book. That
said, not all books are created equal. Let's take them in
chronological order:
"Building Cocoa Applications" by Garfinkel and Mahoney was a great book
when it was written about nine years ago (it was originally a book on
writing applications for NeXT computers). It gives you a nice tour of
the source code to a few interesting projects. At the time it was
written, it was the only book around. I learned a lot from it when I
read it many years ago, but these days, I think there are better
alternatives.
"Learning Cocoa" (first edition) was a terrible book. It had been
written by committee and it showed. O'Reilly published this simply to
be first to market, and I hope they are ashamed to have taken money
from people who trusted the O'Reilly name and forked over cash for it.
It may be the worst book ever written, but I can't be sure because I
haven't read Suzanne Somers' "Eat, Cheat, and Melt the Fat Away."
"Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" by Aaron Hillegass is a really good
book. If you have some experience as a programmer, I still think that
my book is what will help you understand the ideas behind Cocoa. It is
not a reference, and it is not an advanced book. Many kind folks have
written nice things about the book on this mailing list.
"Cocoa Programming" by Anguish, Buck, and Yachtman is the perfect
complement to my book. All the introductory-level topics that didn't
make it into my book are in this one. It is well written by very
knowledgeable authors. If you want to write Cocoa code, you should
own this book and mine. (But, gosh, I wish they had chosen a
different title.)
"Learning Cocoa with Objective-C" by James Duncan Davidson is a puzzle
to me. It is completely different from "Learning Cocoa", but is
startlingly similar to my book. I've looked it over, and it doesn't
really improve on what I've written -- it just sort of paraphrases it.
Given all the books on Cocoa that the world needs (An advanced book? A
book for total beginners? A book for people who are putting GUIs on
databases? A book that covers the core technologies?), why would Mr.
Davidson rewrite my book instead? That said, it is a pretty good book.
There are many topics not covered in any of these books. At the Big
Nerd Ranch, we are working hard to fill in the void. The remainder of
this email will be about our classes. If you are not interested, you
may want to stop reading here.
We will be offering a class on "Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming"
Nov 11-15. It covers multi-threading, authentication, Open
Directory, Exceptions, CFNetwork, Distributed objects, Rendezvous,
performance tools, and all things unix-related.
http://www.bignerdranch.com/Classes/Core.html
Our introductory Cocoa class includes several topics not in my book:
Integrating Cocoa and OpenGL, Writing ScreenSavers, Using Unix
processes from Cocoa, and View Swapping. I'll be teaching that class
Nov 4 - 8.
http://www.bignerdranch.com/Classes/Cocoa1.html
Bruce Momjian will be teach a class on PostgreSQL (including the C
APIs) at the ranch Jan 20 - 24. I've been using PostgreSQL with Cocoa
for several months now, and it is great.
http://www.bignerdranch.com/Classes/Postgresql.html
We hope to have our advanced Cocoa class (Making apps scriptable, undo
manager, a deep look at the text system, etc.) in February. Contact
me if you are interested in this class, and I will write you when we
have a date.
Peace,
Aaron Hillegass
Big Nerd Ranch
404-210-5663
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