Cocoa Design Patterns Book and Online Resources?
Cocoa Design Patterns Book and Online Resources?
- Subject: Cocoa Design Patterns Book and Online Resources?
- From: "Erik M. Buck" <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2003 20:25:24 -0400
For those who don't care about the intricacies of putting together a
1000+ page book, skip this.
I wrote the Tetris MVC walkthrough as part of the original proposal for
the book. Of course, all of the authors had input on all of the
chapters. For one small example, Don wrote almost all of the design
patterns chapter, but parts were moved from the MVC walkthrough chapter
into the design patterns chapter as part of a general reorganization of
the book midway through the project when the publisher asked for 1000
pages instead of the planned 500. Many chapters were edited one way or
another by multiple authors. Don wrote the drawing chapters as one
very long chapter. He and I collaborated to reorganize the material,
and we broke it into sensible smaller chapters. Scott provided much of
the content that is unique to our book and conducted a lot of time
consuming research into poorly documented parts of Mac OS X and Cocoa.
We all read and cross checked each other's work.
"Cocoa Programming" was an exhausting but thoroughly enjoyable
undertaking. All of the authors worked day jobs in addition to the
writing the book. We were able to stick to the original detailed
outline with small exceptions like replacing one drawing chapter with
3.5 as it became clear that the subject deserved more pages. We
actually had to trim content from the book to make it fit within the
publisher's mechanical printing and binding constraints. As much as
we wanted to be comprehensive in our approach, we ended up using the
strategy of explaining key points and then providing references to more
information where it was available. For example, we didn't describe
every method of every class we introduced. Instead we included URLs to
Apple's online documentation or the documentation installed with the
developer tools.
The multiple editors for the project were very good and helped a lot.
We also had technical reviewers who contributed. Unfortunately, a
bunch of mistakes were added between our last draft and the typeset
version of the book. Someone changed every use of the word "effect" to
"affect". Many minus signs (even in code) were converted to em-dashes
by the automated layout system. Inappropriate commas were added to
many sentences. The post-processing mistakes combined with the
authors' mistakes resulted in far too many little bugs in the text.
The errata at www.cocoaprogramming.net lists many. The publisher
promises that all will be fixed in a second edition if we ever sell out
of the first edition. I think the content of the book is of very high
quality even if some of the text has flaws...
All of the authors wanted to compose an indispensable book. We wanted
to write the intermediate to advanced book we wish we had had years
earlier. Don once commented that he wanted to write a book that would
remain open on the desk next to every Cocoa programmer. We have to let
you judge if we succeeded in that goal :)
Meanwhile, O'Reilly has already announce "Cocoa Design Patterns",
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books&field-
author=Buck, Erik M./002-5223349-7676862 , which I am busy
writing behind schedule.
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