Customer Reviews

Programming in Objective-C

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is the most lucid book on programming I have ever read. Having a little (self-taught) experience in C, this book was recommended to me as a good foundation before trying to learn Cocoa for programming on Max OS X. I fully expected to be confronted with the sort of doorstopper that I would never finish, as has been the case with several C++ books; instead, I found a straightforward, uncluttered guide, written by somebody with a genuine talent for teaching.

The author takes the approach of not trying to teach you C first, and this has two advantages: first, if you have no C experience, you get started immediately learning Objective-C, so you don't get taught one thing only to be told to forget it later; second, if you do have some C experience, you are thrown into object-oriented programming right from the start. The explanations are consistently concise but clear, and I found myself getting through a chapter or two every night after work and feeling that I was learning something significant on every page. I read someone describe it elsewhere as "Teach Yourself Objective-C in 21 Days," except that this book really could live up to such a title. I wholeheartedly agree - it took me only three weeks to work through the whole book, including nearly all of the exercises. If, like me, you have seen terms such as "polymorphism", "inheritance", "instance method" and "subclassing" bandied around only to stare at them in mute incomprehension, this book is a revelation. The author introduces all such major concepts very gently - in fact they seem to creep up on you, so that by the time you are presented with the proper terminology you either already know what it means or find yourself exclaiming - as I did - "Oh, so that's all polymorphism is!"

My only gripe - and it is very minor - is that the explanations of bitwise operators and bitfields are near incomprehensible to anybody who doesn't have a programming background (or rather, they are explained well, but there is no indication of when you would ever use them), and the author does occasionally (though rarely) seem to assume that the reader has a solid maths background (when there are those of us out there from humanities and arts backgrounds who want to learn to program, too). These topics take up little more than several paragraphs of the 500 or so pages, though, so if you're a novice, don't let them daunt you as they are the exception rather than the rule.

One thing I appreciated about this book was that full code is provided for 99% of the examples - you are never left with an example that won't compile because the author assumed you could guess the rest yourself. Moreover, whilst the examples and exercises do develop on code from previous chapters - in particular, you will develop a Calculator, Fraction, and Rectangle class in the first part of the book, and AddressCard and AddressBook classes in the second part - the author wisely avoids the build-one-big-program approach that some books adopt. This keeps things fresh and lively - you have to type in different examples, meaning you become familiar with the language through repetition, but at the same time you are doing different things in the examples themselves. Moreover the exercises at the end of each chapter are well judged - you are forced to think and look back through the book to recap on what you have learned, and they are difficult without being too difficult. (Don't skip them!)

In the second part of the book, the author moves on to the Foundation framework, which forms half of Cocoa (Cocoa also uses the AppKit for creating GUI's). You will learn how to use NSString, NSArray, NSDictionary (and their mutable counterparts) and a lot more. It builds on everything you've learned in Part One and provides a bridge between the basics of Objective-C and moving on to Cocoa. I expect that this part of the book especially will become dog-eared very quickly. To sum up, this book took me from knowing nothing about Ojbective-C to feeling as though I could write all the background code for the app I have in mind (ie. everything except the GUI). I am now just hoping that Hillegass's book on Cocoa is half as good.

A word of advice: I urge anybody who buys this book to print off the errata on the author's website (the address is given in the book), as there are a few minor errors that might stump you if you don't. Also, if you use Xcode instead of the command-line tools, you will need to delete the contents of the automatically-generated ..._Prefix.pch file as well as the #import line at the top of main.m each time you start a project (the book only specifies the latter). The prefix file caused me some headaches in one of the later chapters.

A lot of people on various forums say that this is the only book from which to learn Objective-C, and I can see why. In short, if you are reading this review you are probably thinking about learning Objective-C, either for its own sake or as groundwork for moving on to Cocoa. Which means that if you are reading this review, you should buy this book.

I suggest reading this book as a prelude to a book on programming using Cocoa and objective C. I think an especially good match is to read this book (or even the 1st half of it) and then start in with Hillegass' book, then possibly supplement that with "Cocoa Programming" by Anguish, et al. The main strength of Kochan's book is that he teaches Objective C, just Objective C, and that the only tool you need to confront is the commandline. This is much simpler than cranking up Xcode and Interface builder to tackle full-blown Mac Cocoa applications.

My only gripe with this book is the use of "free" rather than retain/release for memory management. This is completely foreign to how things work in Cocoa, and I think it was a mistake to do it this, since you'll just learn to do it differently once you move on to Cocoa, and the point of this book, for me at least, was to get an Objective C grounding for Cocoa. SInce the logical role for this book is to get beginners ready for Cocoa, I think the memory management should have followed standard Cocoa procedures.

Despite this gripe, this is a very useful book for starting in with Objective C and a very reasonable introduction to object oriented programming.

Finally!!!Finally a book that teaches how to write Objective-C programs without knowing C or having to learn Cocoa. I've been waiting for a book like this for a long time. Kochan explains all of the concepts of Objective-C and OOP so clearly using lots of examples. The second part of the book, which covers the Foundation Framework justifies the price of the book alone. I particularly liked the chapter on memory management, which clearly explains the autorelease pool and how it works. This book is a must read for anyone who wants to learn how to write programs in Objective-C, even if you already know C. Now I'm ready to learn how to write Cocoa programs!

I am a Visual Basic developer by trade but I switched to using a Mac at home a while ago. As a programmer I wanted to start writing applications for my Mac and I wanted to use Apple's own development tools. However, having no knowledge of C or C++ seemed to be a major stumbling block since most Objective-C or Cocoa books assume existing knowledge. Stephen is gracious enough to write his book for those of use who do not and his book is all the better for it. The chapters are presented in manageable blocks so that it is easy to sit down and work through an entire chapter without being shut away for hours and hours and everything is clearly laid out and explained in enough detail to be informative whilst not dumbing everything down excessively.

My only gripe, which is not really Stephen's fault, is that I think that I will also need a dedicated Cocoa book to take things further but, as a guide to Objective-C I really cannot recommend this book highly enough.

New Mac computers come with a full suite of excellent objective-c programming tools called Xcode. This book is a great way for inexperienced programmers to learn ObjC without feeling overwhelmed. When I first decided I wanted to take up programming for the Mac, I was concerned that I would feel overwhelmed with arcane terminlogy and confusing explanations. I was very gratified to start into this book with no programming experience other than old school apple //c Basic and be able to write simple programs right from the start. That instills a sense of confidence that I think is essential to success in learning. The author makes sure that you understand what each line of code is for and you never feel like you're typing something that you don't understand.

I purchased this book as a bundle with "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" by Aaron Hillegass. I actually cracked that book first and successfully programmed my first example program. However in chapter 3 he writes "..this chapter assumes that you already know a little C and something about objects..". Since I have no C experience at all and only know about objects as "things", I put that book down and started with "Programming in Objective-C." I'm glad I did. This book focuses more on learning objective-C and touches only a little bit on how to use Xcode. Once I get further along I'm sure that the Hillegass book will be an excellent book for me to learn from.

If you're looking for 2 books to get you started in programming Objective-C, I would highly recommend the 2 book bundle.

Here was my post to the cocoa-dev mailing list (slightly updated as it's a year old):

FROM : Steven Harms
DATE : Thu Jul 29 01:03:34 2004

...[W]e are both in the early stages of learning Cocoa and would like to apply our experiences in other languages to make learning Cocoa easy.

Part of the heuristic of 'how to learn' starts with an editor, a
compiler, and "here is how you declare a variable" - we then move toconditionals, loops, objects etc. Without that education I felt very naked in the O'Reilly books.

I read the first 15 chapters or so of Stephen Kochan's _Programming in Objective-C_ by SAMS press. I am now going through Hillegass' book and am very pleased (outside of the mail i sent moments ago!).

Kochan's book gives enough familiarity in the basics to demystify a lot of the Cocoa work -- Hillegass does a very good job in building up the basics. I would recommend this path to the absolute beginner.

Steven

....

I stand by this post in a very serious way. I really love ObjC just for itself. I'm thinking about teaching my girlfriend how to program, and I'm definitely thinking about using Objective C because it is regular, sensible, modular, OO, and a lot of fun.

It's amazing just how cool ObjC is. It's really quite too bad that most of the Cocoa books (which is why you're really looking at this book, isn't it?) just kinda slap things around loosley with respect to nailing down the essentials of the Objective C language.

I guess they figure they've got to get us to Interface Builder quickly or else our TV-eroded sense of instant gratification kicks in and turns their book into a doorstop (if that's the case, do you /really/ have any business being a programmer?)

In any case, the only ORA press book that does anything considerable with the ObjC foundation is Davidson's book but then the example is fairly trivial (a CD database) and some of the fundamental primitives of the programming language are not even broached.

This foundation is where Kochan excels. Contrary to other reviewers I love that he teaches from a text editor + compiler approach. I think that the Xtools that apple provides makes writing Cocoa a bit *too* easy. As a result I don't really understand what I'm doing. Much like a child who has learned a series of signs and expressions and can utter them, the mental clay has not been marked with the meaning of those symbols.

If you want to learn Cocoa, I still say put away XTools and ORA press (as good as they are at most other things). Start with Kochan, (vim|emacs), and gcc and get your basics down. From there you'll have an excellent foundation and won't be confused / irritated / baffled by "unexplained magic" that appears in other cocoa books.

A book on programming Objective C that doesn't require you to know C first! This one is long overdue. It's well organized. It's very clear and it's loaded with sample code you can enter as you learn. Here's the important thing, it teaches you how to write code in Objective C while avoiding the construction of interfaces. As odd as that may seem, this really does make life simpler in the beginning. What is really nice is that it shows you how do this while using X-Tools or Project Builder editors so you do not have to be a "command-line cowboy" to program the Mac.

Great stuff!

I was given this book as a birthday gift and having a little experience in computer programming with languages like Pascal, C#, C and C++ and a little bit of BASIC. I have always wanted to build my own programs using the latest and greatest programming languages but I didn't know where to begin.

I was trying to do some of the online tutorials and reading books on C\C++ but the author of the book or tutorial assumed that the person learning the language had prior knowledge of the language, which I had none.

I wanted a language that was object-oriented and Objective-C fit the bill, because instead of learning procedures, as you would with C\C++, you learn about objects and how to use those objects in a productive way.

If you want to learn about object-oriented programming, then buy this book then go and read Apple's own book on Objective-C. I am in part 2, Chapter 15, page 315 of the book and have learned a lot since I got the book.

The examples and exercises in the book are very easy to do and understand so you're not sitting at the computer scratching your head trying to figure out what the author is trying to tell you, try to find that in any other book on programming languages.

I find it absolutely amazing how much information can be learned from this book. All I can say to the author is thank you so much for making computer programming fun.

I learned C using Mr. Kochans' "Programming in C" book and I left yet another glowing review under that one a year ago. This one is not quite as easy to follow, but the concepts themselves aren't as easy as C was, so I can't fault the author. If I had not read his Objective-C book before starting into the Hillegass book, I would have been MUCH more frustrated trying to understand Cocoa. In the beginning of the Hillegass book he had me clicking and dragging stuff in the Interface Builder, doing his best to explain the concepts to me (somewhat unsuccessfully). Then, when he has you look at the actual code that was generated by all of the clicking-and-dragging, the proverbial light bulb came on... I said to myself "Stephen explained all of this in his book".

Reading just the first half of this book will help you understand ANY Cocoa book better.

Stephen Kochan books are always clear and concise and deliver all the material you need to know in a straight forward way. While I have been programming in ObjectiveC for since 1990, I bought this book to add to my library. To my surprise I realized that I also own a very worn 1988's copy of Programming in C.

One interesting twist on this book, is that it doesn't presume that you know how to program in C so it covers the C underpinnings of the language.