Cocoa Recipes for Mac OS X [Paperback]

Bill Cheeseman (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0201878011 | ISBN-13: 978-0201878011 | Publication Date: November 14, 2002

Cocoa Recipes for Mac OS X takes a practical, no-nonsense, hands-on, step-by-step approach, walking you through the details of building a Cocoa application from start to finish. It explains in detail what the code is doing and why it works, Cocoa Recipes places a decided emphasis on getting an application to work correctly as quickly as possible. This collection of, do-it-yourself recipes guides you through the process of creating classes and subclasses, objects, outlets, and actions. Cocoa is one of the main object-oriented software development environments for Mac OS X.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Cocoa Cookbook for Mac OS X takes a practical, no-nonsense, hands-on, step-by-step approach, walking you through the details of building a Cocoa application from start to finish. It explains in detail what the code is doing and why it works, Cocoa Cookbook places a decided emphasis on getting an application to work correctly as quickly as possible. This is a collection of simple, do-it-yourself recipes to guide you through the process of creating classes and subclasses, objects, outlets, and actions.

About the Author

Product Details

• Paperback: 780 pages
• Publisher: Peachpit Press (November 14, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201878011
• ISBN-13: 978-0201878011
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,162,250 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #46 in Books > Computers & Technology > Apple > Cocoa

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An unusual and very practical approach, but not for everyone, May 9, 2004

By 

Ben Haller "Stick Software" (Foster City, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cocoa Recipes for Mac OS X (Paperback)

This book takes an unusual approach that some people seem to like and others don't. The entire book is devoted to building a single Cocoa application, step by step. Each step builds on what has come before, so you really can't jump around in the book at all. And the book is entirely example-driven; there is very little text talking about higher-level concepts, principles and design. If you learn best by example, and you want to see a large, high-quality application in Cocoa built from the ground up, then this book might be very good for you. Others will probably find it frustrating.

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The ULTIMATE MAC OS X tutorial learning guide, November 26, 2002

By 

Kelsey McClanahan (Northeastern, NV United States of America) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Cocoa Recipes for Mac OS X (Paperback)

Cocoa Recipes for Mac OS X is a great guide for anyone interested in writing applications for MAC OS X. It is chocked full of USEFUL real-life programming examples. Each chapter successively builds upon the last to churn out and refine a true to the bone Mac OS X application. Nearly everything you'd like to learn how to accomplish with the Cocoa Framework is here. Lots of code examples show you how to implement tabbed views, menus, drawers and a whole slew of other user-controls.

One outstanding feature this book provides (and should be standard in every programming book) is a Table of Topics. This table immediately follows the table of contents and provides an alphabetical list of controls, objects, and major classes from the Cocoa Framework and where in the book to find examples on coding these items. This feature is great. If you've ever thumbed through a programming book in frustration looking for an example on how to program some obscure function that you recall reading once... --you'll understand just how useful a Table of Topics is!

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but a chore to learn from, August 22, 2003

By 

E. Jensen (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cocoa Recipes for Mac OS X (Paperback)

I have been working on learning Cocoa part-time so this seemed like a good book to try to get me up to speed. There is a lot of information packed in this text- unlike some, there are really very few figures and pictures and there is an awful lot of explanatory text and digressions as new concepts arise. The main problem I have with the approach here is that it takes a _long_ time between successive builds of the application. In fact, one must plow through 70+ pages before even getting to the first time you are told to build an executable of what you have been working on. This really goes counter to the Cocoa paradigm of ease of application construction- I much prefer a more experimental approach in which small incremental changes are made to the application, so that the effect of new features can be appreciated right away. Here, by the time you rebuild the application, a lot of time has passed since you coded the features, so the connection between the code and the app feature is not so immediate or clear. Also, if there are bugs from your typing, it is hard to fix your app as it has been a long time since a previous build, so for someone new to Cocoa, it can be hard to know where to look for the errors.