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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The other side of the coin from Hillegass, March 4, 2010
This review is from: Learn Cocoa on the Mac (Learn Series) (Paperback)
The "gold standard" for learning Cocoa programming has been Hillegass's book Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition) for a long time. However, it is slightly in need of revision. This book is a worthy supplement or even an alternate - the style is quite different, a bit more playful. Nutting, LaMarche and Mark have done a great job of explaining some of the whys and wherefores of doing things the cocoa way and have the advantage of working with Leopard and Snow Leopard. So this is a bit easier to follow and doesn't run into the "xyz is deprecated" debugging notes (so much, there are still a few!). However, Hillegass is determined to make sure his students think, so his book has problems for the reader to solve, some of which are pretty challenging and have several solutions. This book takes a "here's how you do it, why you do it this way and read the manual for anything else". Different folks will have different views as to which book is better - I think that they complement each other quite well and are both well worth reading. I find I learn different things from the two books and regard them both equally.
The authors give a very thorough coverage of bindings and Core Data. I was not aware of the fact that you can drop a datamodel entity into Xcode to obtain most of the nuts and bolts of a fully functional application, completely automatically. This alone was worth the price of the book - a clear explanation for binding and methods for dealing with large datasets (not covered elsewhere, even in the excellent Cocoa Design Patterns. For the cocoa programmer, this almost puts Xcode up as a simple alternative to Filemaker, although the latter has a slew of built in features that would be hard work to implement directly in cocoa.
This is a strongly recommended book for the slightly above novice programmer (you do need to know the basics of C) wanting to jump-start learning cocoa to the fairly experienced programmer who needs a refresher on bindings and core data.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Shoddy Kindle Conversion, January 16, 2011
There are plenty of reviews of the content so I'm just going to review the aspects of this book specific to the Kindle. However, my star rating is for the ebook as a whole as it would be unfair to penalize the content because of the conversion to the Kindle.
As usual, the publishers have made a poor effort at conversion and should be ashamed of themselves.
The images are at too low a resolution. Many of these images are intended to show the state of various user interface widgets so that you can make sure they match up with what you have on your screen. But these images are at too low a resolution to see what's going on and it's a real strain to compare. This applies both to reading the Kindle version on a Kindle device and with the Kindle app for the Mac.
The code examples have been converted as images. This means you can't search within the code examples and that when you adjust the font, the size of the code sample font (which is pretty small) can't be adjusted. In addition, when the code samples span a page boundary of the original text, they appear to have been scanned as two separate images with one placed atop the other. No attempt has been made to make the two images line up, so the code examples have random alignment changes in the middle of them. In at least one case the person doing the conversion failed to notice that two blocks of code were separated by a block of regular text meaning that the whole lot appears in the ebook as one image with the intervening text appearing as an unadjustable, unsearchable image too.
None of these issues could possibly have been missed if there were any attempt at proofreading whatsoever. In this age of hyperbole you might be tempted to read that as an exaggeration. I mean it literally. It's clear that nobody at the publisher had no more than a glance at the result of conversion before this was shipped to Amazon for downloading. That's a pity. The print version is attractively presented and the content isn't bad either.
And of course it's frustrating that the book is full of boilerplate code that I'd really like to just copy out of the ebook into Xcode, but I can't do this.
This is the first time I've tried to use an ebook as a programming tutorial. On the plus side it has this great advantage: I could run the Kindle app on the secondary display and never have to worry about repeatedly forcing the book to lie flat. So it's much more convenient to use than the print version.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Cocoa, Xcode and Interface Builder kick-start, March 13, 2010
This review is from: Learn Cocoa on the Mac (Learn Series) (Paperback)
Jack Nutting has played, worked and turned Cocoa (and it's NeXTStep predecessor) inside out since the 80s. You can see that. He knows not only how but also why. And he shares that knowledge in this book.
Cocoa is a huge scope. An introductory book must select what is most important to learn first. This book does that. Furthermore, it is a great introduction to Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter...ehh, I mean Xcode and Interface Builder. The only thing that the book demands is that the reader has basic knowledge in Objective-C.
One of my principles as a writer is that more pictures and fewer words, doesn't make it harder to grasp - quite the contrary. This book is richly illustrated with screen shots, and the language is both simple and efficient.
This is a book for those who finally want to start to implement a killer app for the Mac desktop.
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