Re: Cocoa Books (was New to Cocoa)
Re: Cocoa Books (was New to Cocoa)
- Subject: Re: Cocoa Books (was New to Cocoa)
- From: James Duncan Davidson <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 16:19:58 -0700
On Friday, Oct 11, 2002, at 12:12 US/Pacific, Aaron Hillegass wrote:
"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.
Call me Duncan. Please. We met at WWDC even if you might not remember.
I appreciate the compliment on the book (even following the "rewrite"
claim). I worked hard on Learning Cocoa and yes, you're right, we're
not going to get rich at this. So, why indeed write Learning Cocoa with
Objective-C?
In the beginning I was going to write a Cocoa/Java book. (Well,
actually before that I was going to write a book on some of the Java
stuff I was involved with before (Ant, Tomcat, etc), but... that's
another story). But when I took a good look at the Learning Cocoa book
as it stood, it was obvious that there was lots there that could be
improved--and I let the people at O'Reilly know what I thought. I think
that I said something along the lines of "If I were to write a book
like this, I would structure it like..." That led to an offer to
rewrite the Learning Cocoa book shortly after WWDC last year.
You always have to be careful about opening your mouth. :)
I took it on as part of a plan at the time to do a Java version of the
material as well targeted at helping Java developers come up to speed
on Cocoa. (think "Learning Cocoa with Java" to complement the
Objective-C title) When your book showed up some time after I got
started, I was suprised as well about the similarities in outline. But
I continued on amid some bumps (we almost cancelled in the face of
"Building Cocoa Applications" coming in a lot more basic that we
thought it would--I was hoping that it would be more of an advanced
book, but oh well...) and the results are out there. The primary
impetus for a while was to have the material for the Java book ready to
go.
Also, even though I shouldn't attempt to put words in their mouth,
O'Reilly's impetus was to make sure that there was a better book in
place of the Learning Cocoa book that was there before. There have been
other books in O'Reilly's history that have taken a lot of criticism
and heat before--and where that happens, they really try hard to make
sure that they address the market and get things up to where they
should rather than just let them rot out there.
Yeah, there are similarities between the book outlines, but I can
assure you that I didn't sit down and rewrite your book. I did take a
bit of offense at the idea that I paraphrased your material, but I'm
letting it roll off my back. My book was way too far in progress by the
time your book came out to change course much. Mostly, I chalk it up to
the fact that the structure of both outlines is influenced from having
done public presentations trying to teach people. How many ways indeed
can you slice the problem? I've done more short subject speaking,
you've done lots of week long training, but I'm sure that there is some
shared approach in tackling the problem.
Also, Learning Cocoa with ObjC is not a totally new book, but a rewrite
of what came before rather than a completely new effort. A thorough
rewrite--probably 20% of the words there were unchanged from before,
but I did liberally use Apple sourced material where it made sense, and
of course the 80% of new words that I wrote were based on the material
that they had written, even if I did, in some cases, treat it as
research.
I do think that in the scheme of things, your book is a bit more
advanced than "Learning Cocoa with Objc" -- I spend quite a bit more
time focusing on OOP and Foundation stuff before getting into the GUI
world while skipping out on material like Drag and Drop that you do
cover. And, Chapter 3 where OOP is explained is something that I'm
rather quite proud of (4 or more total rewrites of that chapter. Ugh.)
And that's why in the Preface I put "Cocoa Programming for OS X" down
as a next step after Learning Cocoa with ObjC. I do think it's a good
step up, even if some of the material is repetition. After all, some
repetition is good in studying a subject.
So, that's the story... If I had it to do all over again, I would have
come in a bit more basic so that there was more differentiation, but
then, we're all working with different publishers and not really
communicating with each other. Maybe we should pull together some sort
of "Cocoa Book Cabal" -- not that the publishers would like that. :)
As to that "Learning Cocoa with Java" title, well, it's *not* in flight
at the current moment. It remains on the radar, but it hasn't gone
further. There's several reasons for this, not the least of which is
that I've become quite enamored with Objective-C and use it for most of
my work these days. I use Java for the gigs that pay me to use Java
(and in places where it really makes sense to use Java), but... the fun
stuff is ObjC.
And, like you say, there are other topics in the Cocoa world that need
to be covered first.
--
James Duncan Davidson
email@hidden
!try(); do()
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