Customer Reviews

Developing Business Applications with OpenStep TM

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This book is interesting from a historical perspective, because it is one of the last books about OpenStep/NEXTstep before it became Cocoa subsequent to Next being bought by Apple. Of course, we all know that Mac OS X and iPhone are powered by Cocoa. This is a pretty good intro to Objective-C and also contains information about implementations by Next and Sun. Sun abandoned OpenStep to devote attention to Java.

I bought the book because I wanted to learn to do Objective-C with GNUstep under Linux, and there is no book devoted to that subject. The GNU counterparts to Project Builder and Interface Builder are called Project Center and Gorm. For that purpose the book is not bad (but not great either). It does cover the basics of the language and has a complete example application in three different versions, one with distributed objects and one with enterprise objects.

Unfortunately, because the book focuses on "business applications" and since it seems the authors believe such applications typically don't focus on graphics, they completely ignore the drawing and graphics features of OpenStep. I think that their assumption shows a lack of imagination. Worse, the book has long sections which become very boring to read. For example, Chapter 4 on the Application Kit doesn't have any examples. You have to wait until Chapter 7 before you get to write your first application and they try to teach too many concepts with that one application. When learning a new language and development environment, it is pretty standard to start with something very very simple (like a hello world application) so you can get to know the compiler and tools first.

Because the book is not comprehensive, it is not suitable as a basic reference. To fill in some of the gaps, I am thinking of also getting Building Cocoa Applications : A Step by Step Guide by Simson Garfinkel (2002) which is an updated version of his earlier book, NeXTSTEP Programming: STEP ONE: Object-Oriented Applications (1993). Also, the Cocoa book by Aaron Hillegass looks to be very good. There are also some on-line resources, but the ones specific to GNUstep are not so great.