Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 2nd Edition (Paperback)

by James Duncan Davidson (Author), Inc. Apple Computer (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Based on the Jaguar release of Mac OS X 10.2, this new edition of Learning Cocoa covers the latest updates to the Cocoa frameworks, including examples that use the Address Book and Universal Access APIs. Also included with this edition is a handy quick reference card, charting Cocoa's Foundation and AppKit frameworks, along with an Appendix that includes a listing of resources essential to any Cocoa developer--beginning or advanced. After introducing you to Project Builder and Interface Builder, Learning Cocoa with Objective-C brings you quickly up to speed on the concepts of object-oriented programming with Objective-C, the language of choice for building Cocoa applications. From there, each chapter presents a different sample program for you to build, with easy to follow, step-by-step instructions to teach you the fundamentals of Cocoa programming. The techniques you will learn in each chapter lay the foundation for more advanced techniques and concepts presented in later chapters.

About the Author
James Duncan Davidson is a freelance author, software developer, and consultant focusing on Mac OS X, Java, XML, and open source technologies. He is the author of Learning Cocoa with Objective-C (published by O'Reilly & Associates) and is a frequent contributor to the O'Reilly Network online website as well as publisher of his own website, x180 (http://www.x180.net), where he keeps his popular weblog. Duncan was the creator of Apache Tomcat and Apache Ant and was instrumental in their donation to the Apache Software Foundation by Sun Microsystems . While working at Sun, he authored two versions of the Java Servlet API specification as well as the Java API for XML Processing. Duncan regularly presents at conferences all over the world on topics ranging from open source and collaborative development to programming Java more effectively. He didn't graduate with a Computer Science degree, but sees that as a benefit in helping explain how software works. His educational background is in Architecture (the bricks and mortar kind), the essence of which he applies to every software problem that finds him. He currently resides in San Francisco, California.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; 2 edition (September 20, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596003013
• ISBN-13: 978-0596003012
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #109,837 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #4 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Apple > Cocoa
  #6 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > C > Objects
  #15 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > C > Tutorials

• This item is part of The O'Reilly Learning Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT Book To Learn Cocoa and Objective-C Programming From!, November 29, 2002

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

I have both this book (Learning Cocoa with Objective-C) and it's predecessor (Learning Cocoa). These are two completely different books. The first book wasn't hardly worth the paper it was printed on, as it was mostly just a thrown together collection of rag-tag tutorials from Apple's web site. Thankfully, this book is NOT the first book!

Fast forward to verison II, Learning Cocoa w/ Objective C. This book is great! It covers a whole slew of topics ommitted by the first version. Thankfully the content is NOT the same as before. A tiny bit of it is similar, but for the most part one person took it upon themselves to make sure that all of the material was presented in a consistent manner. By the end of this book you'll walk through all of the steps required to write an application similar to TextEdit (provided with Mac OS X). This application will support Rich Text Formatting, save and open capabilities, spell checking and much much more. You'll be impressed with what you build in this "Learning" book. If you've ever done the REALBasic tutorial you'll find that this creates a very similar application using the Cocoa Framework and Objective-C.

All the basics of learning to write MAC OS X applications with Cocoa are covered here. Unlike the first version of this book it doesn't assume you already knew Objective-C or have had exposure to NextStep. If you're looking for a good book to expose you to Cocoa and Objective-C programming buy this book and work through it all. It's worth it!

This book will also guide you through using the debugger in Project Builder. You'll learn how to use the debugger print-object command and other useful debugging techniques. This book does more than just point out the fact that the debugger exists. It shows you how to apply it usefully.

Another thing I like about this book is the fact that it covers NSString's in more detail than other books of the genre. You'll see examples on how to pull substrings out of NSStrings and use NSRange. You'll also see demonstartions of using NSMutableString as well. Several other books merely mention that NSMutableString exists, but then fail to show what is different between the two.

The excersises at the end of each chapter are very helpful in learning Cocoa Programming too! They're not too difficult, but not too simple either. They'll make you dig and think a bit to find a solution, but not so much that you'll want to pull your hair out and give up. AND If you go happen to get stuck you'll find answers revealed in the back of the book.

This book is for the most part geared towards Mac OS X 10.2, but I did manage to do all of the examples in 10.1.5 (except with the programming example that made use of the Jaguar's Address Book, of course.) This is a bonus, for some of the earlier Cocoa Programming books do not take into account newer versions of Mac OS X and thus are now a bit out of date.

Surprisingly, this book is thicker too, but only because it's now on quality paper. The book actually contains fewer pages (by only a dozen or so) than the original, but Cocoa programming is covered much more thoroughly. There's not much textual fluff or irrelevant screen shots to gobble up pages; --just the right balance of what is needed to cover Cocoa and Objective-C programming for the beginning or semi-intermeddiate programmer.

If you already own the first book don't worry about buying this one and receiving repeat material. These two books are not the same animal (even though the dog on the front cover is the same). They are two totally different creatures with internal organs unique to themselves. In fact, after working through the second edition you might find the first edition more useful; --as you will have gained knowledge from the second version to more completely comprehend chapters in the latter part of the frist version.

One more note: THANK YOU O'REILLY & ASSOCIATES! You're breathing new life into books for the Macintosh! Be it mac-only books (like this Cocoa Programming book) or just the fact that you include MAC OS X specifics in books like "Managing and Using MySQL (2nd Edition)". Myself and I'm sure many others appreciate it. Thanks!

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good book, but not the best book, May 9, 2004

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

A very popular book, and greatly improved in its second edition. Very example and tutorial oriented; somewhat out of date at this point, however.  Helps the user learn Interface Builder, ProjectBuilder and Objective-C, too. Possibly a bit shallow to get the reader writing their own Cocoa programs from scratch, but a good introduction. Ultimately, probably not as recommended for a first purchase as Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish or Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Overall, this book provides an adequate introduction, but..., January 6, 2003

By	digitalshadow (dark side of the moon) - See all my reviews

...for me this book, by itself, came up a little short in certain areas. The first book on Cocoa programming that I had purchased was Aaron Hillegass' "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X". After reading and working the examples from the first 4 chapters of Mr. Hillegass' book, I was still having difficulty grasping the concepts -- or at least more difficulty than I thought I should be having -- of Cocoa programming. That's when I discovered Mr. Davidson's book at my local bookstore. After reading the first few chapters, I was able to grasp the concepts that had eluded me whilst studying Mr. Hillegass' book. Put simply: it all started making sense.

In my opinion, neither book, by itself, provides a complete introduction to Cocoa programming; rather, it is the combination of *both* books that truly provides the introductory material that's fundamental to understanding Cocoa and Objective-C programming. In addition, Mr. Davidson has provided, in my opinion, a more logical and easier to follow progression of topics. Unfortunately, he also fails to provide sufficient depth on some topics after their introduction. Two examples that readily come to mind are the collection classes and memory management. On these two topics, I tip my hat to Mr. Hillegass for providing the better instruction because he: 1.) also explained and gave an example of using enumerators (think C++ interators) to traverse a collection, and 2.) because he gave a very good explanation of where and how to use autoreleased objects in functions.

Overall, I think my biggest compliment about this book is that it maintains a high degree of consistency in the way topics are presented. My biggest complaint is that, in certain areas, the depth of the presentation is simply too shallow. With a little more sustenance, this book could easily become the de facto standard for an introduction to Cocoa programming using Objective-C.