Customer Reviews

The Mac Xcode 2 Book

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

It's about time someone wrote a programming book that shows the reader how to get things done with the tool at hand while staying halfway engaging. This book goes far beyond that, believe me. It's loaded with useful info and is a good read as well. The authors show how all of Apple's tools work, both by themselves and with each other, to meet the needs of the broad range of developers. Beginning coders will learn the important development basics they'll need to know, while the advanced folks get a rundown and real-world examples for Xcode features and techniques that will help them to streamline their development processes and refine their products. All the while, the pages are full of entertaining explanations and examples. The book presents useful tips to those engaging in small, medium, and large development projects without favoring any particular approach, avoiding the "methodology wars" that often color works on software development. Great resource.

This is a book about Xcode, Apple's IDE for Mac OS X.

It is not a book about how to program.

It is not a book about Cocoa.

It is about Xcode. That's why the word Xcode is in the title. This book *only* deals with using the Xcode environment. It's an introduction to Xcode 2.0. That's it. That's what it does.

Furthermore, it's a book in the Ihnatko series. Andy Ihnatko is not really known for his programming skills. He's known for being funny, in a wacky media-driven way. This book is in Ihnatko's style, in that it has a lot of humor. It's written by two very experienced programmers/software engineers, people who've worked on products you've used.

It covers a lot of territory--including things like using Subversion with Xcode, how Interface Builder works, some pointers about using Malloc and debugging, and a discussion of the build process. It covers things in an introductory fashion, offers some practical suggestions about implementation and process, and third party tools, and points you to more information. It does that in an amusing but helpful fashion, and it does it well.

A lot of the reviewers here are complaining that the book isn't about programming, or Cocoa or some other book they wanted. Don't blame the book for your foolishness. You can search the book right here--take a look. There's an excerpt and even the index, all avalable from this Amazon page. See if it the book has what you need, but don't blame the book for not being what you wanted it to be; that's your problem for trying to make something other than it is.

The Mac Xcode 2 Book is a good introduction to, and overview of Xcode, written in a humorous style that manages to convey a lot of information in a small space.

From what little I could get though of this book, it looks like there should be some good technical information in this book which is why I am giving it two stars instead of one.

The problem is there is just way too many jokes in this book for me, to the point it's very annoying. I mean literally nearly ever sentence contains a joke.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a stick in the mud and I enjoy humor, but this is just way over the top. It really makes the book hard to read and follow the topics.

Unless you like this over the top style of writing, I would look for another book on Xcode.

The book is, as its title says, about xcode2. It is NOT about Cocoa. If you are familiar with Objective C to begin with this book will teach you the API, and do it fairly painlessly. If you want to choose just one book, make it "Cocoa Programming for MAC OS X", by Aaron Hillegass. The Hillegass book is much more useful in actually learning to program in Cocoa. It's also more of a challenge. Hillegass tells you up front "This is hard. You are notr stupid." He's right.

I haven't finished the book yet, but I have to say, if they would just stop inserting supposedly homorous asides every third sentence (one of those cases where they think they're funny, but they're not), this book would move a lot quicker, and I would learn more because I wouldn't be constantly distracted by something I thought was going to be useful information, only to realize it was something I should have ignored.

Humorous example projects and explanations using odd names and unique problems can be fun and memorable, but using tired, corny and just plain dumb jokes for the sake of seeing them clutter up the page is not only insipid, but annoying to those who put their brains in "learn mode" to get information, only to be distracted by "jokes" that add no value whatsoever.

That said, the book is definitely informative when it comes to the Xcode toolset-- if only there wasn't so much fat to ignore to get at the meat.

This isn't a book about writing code; it's a book about the Mac OS X tool kit Apple gives away for writing code. The first 20 pages construct a simple "Hello, World" Cocoa app to provide some operational context for the reader, but it's goal is to explain the tools not the tech. The next 140 pages walk through different aspects like the build system, the help system, the customizable preferences, and so forth. The authors highlight features you may have overlooked and try to cut through a bit of the Mac developer vocabulary, but there aren't many tasks to work if you prefer a tutorial style of instruction. It isn't until the last 50 pages covering the debugger, optimization tools, and version control features that I think the book hits its stride and provides information on features that aren't well documented otherwise.

There is room for improvement though. The writing style is written to be very humorous and can be somewhat distracting. The authors also have a small bias for the Carbon frameworks, which I don't share, so I found a few of their asides about the advantages of Carbon mildly off-topic but for the most part the tools stay the focus of their writing. Also note that this book doesn't talk about WebObjects (which were included for free in Tiger) nor the concepts of the upcoming PowerPC to Intel transition (which were features added in version 2.1). While not a waste of time, I found much of the early part of the book to be easily discoverable information and was somewhat disappointed by the brevity of the final chapters.

While this book does have several useful bits of information, finding them requires a torturous slog through some of the worst "technical" writing I have come across. The authors of this book seem to think of themselves as brilliant commedians, wasting no opportunity to interject a "witty" aside. It is a rare paragraph that doesn't suffer from these distractions, making for a very frustrating reading experience if you're just trying to learn something about the topic ostensibly under discussion. The authors also have a fondness for throwing completely unrelated material into the mix in the form of dozens of call-out boxes that, when combined with the liberal use of oversized screenshots, breaks every page up into a patchwork grid of text, images, and call-outs. I cannot recommend this book to anyone serious about learning and understanding Xcode 2.

If you’re looking for a book to learn XCode and how to code in Object-C this book will disappoint. If you want to be truly satisfied I recommend Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (2nd Edition) by Aaron Hillegass you won't be disappointed!

I think this book is more suited to people that have a limited programming background that are in a management position, who wish to gain an overview and broad understanding of what XCode and OSX has to offer from a development perspective.

The authors mention that they use to develop code. Therefore they are looking at XCode from a perspective of what it can offer to a developer.

When choosing books in the future I’m going to look at the author’s background and read their bio’s to gain an understanding of their perspective to aid in understanding what the content may offer.

There is no point purchasing a book to learn how to program using Xcode if it the authors no longer develop themselves (as they state at the beginning of this book!).

I usually have good judgement when getting technical books. I was wrong with this one. This book will not help an existing programmer get familiar with X-Code, and won't help a novice get started. The main reason? It is full of garbage anecdote's that just distract the user and interrupt the flow of trying to learn something. The book is horrible on explaining the X-Code IDE and in explaining any Objective C or Cocoa references. Do Not waster your money.

This book has probably the most aggravating style I've ever read. HORRIBLE DORKY COMMENTS are liberally sprinkled all throughout the book. It's distracting because I'm now on the defensive for these embarrassing comments such that if I suspect an embarrassing comment is imminent, I skip ahead, hopefully not missing any relevant data. How could the editors tolerate this? Jeez, horrible, simply horrible.

The info is good enough; you just have to hold your nose while reading. Thanks for killing the extra trees needed to accomodate those dumb quips.