Customer Reviews

Advanced Mac OS X Programming (2nd Edition of Core Mac OS X & Unix Programming)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Although this book is well written in concept, the editing of the final product is awful. There are a great deal of grammatical errors which seemed to me a basic word-processor would have caught.

The book should be titled, more correctly, "Unix Programming for OS X." Unix system programmers will find almost nothing new in this book (gcc, gdb, file-systems, signals, libraries, etc. - although, the Objective-C examples can be helpful in understanding how to implement things in new ways, and also the chapter on Subversion was a nice introduction for me.)

If you are just learning how to program on a Unix platform, I'd recommend this book unequivocally. I paid full price for mine ($70), without taking a hard enough look at the contents and found myself with an expensive, redundant book on my shelf.

If you're a Mac OS X developer and want to get serious about it, this book is mandatory. It is always on my desk right by the computer, and really is that perfect reference. Nothing really compares to this book, the previous Aaron Hillegass book is rather basic but is more of an introduction. I have a BS degree in CS and even though a lot of this has been covered, the rest of it is done in graduate school. So if you're looking for that little bit extra, give it a shot.

This book fills in most gaps you might encounter while learning about the low-level BSD/Mach aspect of Mac OS X and Darwin. Mach and BSD iokit is described in detail, and there are tons of useful code examples all over the book. This book even explains ipc and pipes very well, and isn't the size of the bible, like other books. It gets to the point as soon as you get past the TOC.

When I first received this book, I was intimidated by the advanced topics in the table of contents and also the format of the book. It looked painfully dry and highly complicated, but as I started reading the book, I realized it is very reader-friendly. This books very well describes the unix tools for version control, testing, and development. There is a very useful chapter on subversion which gives enough introduction to get things rolling. It also provides topics on os X technologies that you won't find in other books such as Bonjour, Multi-Processing, and Keychain management. I think it is an essential complement to any Cocoa development book.

Advanced topics are described with a very easy language and I was able to read almost half of the book in a few days, and trust me, I'm a slow reader. I recommend this book to all Mac OS X programmers and Cocoa Aficionados.

I convinced the school library to buy the old version as it's too expensive. This 2nd edition is a lot cheaper and has a lot more to offer than its previous incarnation.

A few specific things:
* The chapter of Subversion is very useful, with some small nice XCode integration walkthrough.
* Also the chaper of Daemons and launchd, probably the only book that mentioned this.
* CFRunLoop chapter is nice. My favourite chapter.

There're a lot other small tips and tricks that Apple should have documented nicely somewhere, like those environment variables DYLD_PRINT_LIBRARIES showing dynamic libraries in used.

Anyway, must have book for all MacOS X cocoa and unix developers!

A must have for any serious MAC OS developer. Written in 2005, some of the content in this book is dated, mostly those chapters related to Frameworks and performance tools. However the book mostly focuses on the internals of MAC OS which is a mature unix platform that hardly ever changes over the years. Therefore most of the content in this book is still very much relevant to current MAC OS.

This is a book that is about Mac OS X programming. Its easy to forget its title and expect that it would be advanced Cocoa programming but that is not the intent and therefore not what it delivers. What it does do is provide a lot of details regarding programming OS X apps and various aspects of the system that you don't find elsewhere. The primary aspect of this book that I liked was the fact it filled in many little gaps that I definitely needed filling. I definitely recommend this book for those who want to fill in those gaps like I did.

If you want to know about the finer details of Mac OS X Programming, this is the book to get. This is, by far, the most detailed book on the subject available on the market. The author does an excellent job of covering all of the most pertinent topics to the nth level. If you want to be a hardcore Mac OS X programmer, get and read this book!!

This book is full of excellent information which is hard to find anywhere else, but it is also unbelievably full of typos. As I'm reading, I come across at least one or two mistakes per page! You'd think they could have taken the time to proofread it, especially considering that this is the second edition.

Don't expect to learn to code from this book, but once you know how this book will help you solve any problems that you run across.
I don't think that I'll ever read it cover-to-cover, but I know that it will always be in my library.