Customer Reviews

Foundations of Mac Programming

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

 

 

This book tells you how to get started making your own Mac programs.

To use this book, you should know C or C++.

I highly recommend this book to people new to the Mac toolbox.

"Foundations of Mac Programming" is a spectacular book that will give the burgeoning mac programmer a fine backround in the subject. A minimal knowledge of C is required to understand what this book teaches. This book will indeed provide a firm foundation, though it does not get overly detailed in terms of graphics and files, thus more seasoned macintosh programmer will not benefit much from it.

Get the basics of C down then this book gets you going real fast. The CodeWarrior(CW) examples on the CD need to be updated for current CW but this is easy to do. Each chapter focuses on a Mac Toolbox Manager. It's up to you to start "playing around" by combining different Toolboxes together. I really got alot out of the book. The author also writes for MacTech magazine every month with Dave Marks.

This book is really good after a first course in C. He reviews how pointers and handlers work in memory management. The CD is a bit dated and doesn't work w/ the new professional codewarrior 3.

This book starts from the basics -- the Mac basics like windows, events, menus, etc. This was the first (and thusfar only) book that I found which focused almost solely on interface programming and memory management. With the help of this book I was able to get a fully functioning Macintosh program up-and-running in no time, leaving my time free to work on the specifics of my project. My only complaint is that the examples are C instead of C++.

This is possibly the best programming book I have ever read. I started off as a complete novice to programming C applications under the Mac OS and just by working my way through several of the chapters, I have been able to develop, compile and run an application which uses multiple windows and dialog boxes. In addition, I was able to do it in under a week of actually coding. Basically, I started off with C code which ran under text based UNIX. I said "OK, I need a graphical display window" and looked in the chapters on windows and drawing for information on how to code those parts of the program. Then I said "OK, I need some dialogs to customize my calculations" and looked in the chapter on dialogs to see how to code those parts of the application. My code is still a bit rough, i.e. it is not the most sophisticated code one will find, but it does exactly what it needs to do. I think this book is a great reference for someone who is not a beginner to programming in general, but is a beginner to Mac programming.

Teaches Mac C, but leaves out the basics of C. I recommend getting "Learn C on the Macintosh", by Dave Mark instead. When you've read that, come back to this book.