Customer Reviews

Quartz 2D Graphics for Mac OS X® Developers

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

 

 

I thought this was a great book for Mac programmers who want to know more about Quartz. It is well written and easy to follow. There is a CD-ROM with the sample code included with the book. It covers the essentials and gives "Best Practices" advice on actually using Quartz in a professional program, including performance issues. R. Scott Thompson is a talented author and I hope he will write more programming books in the future.

It starts with a clear introduction to Quartz, but gets right to some useful techniques, such as off-screen bitmaps, writing images to a PNG file, etc. It covers the basics, like CGContexts, Affine transforms, Bezier curves, and Paths, in a clear and insightful manner. You could learn most of this material from the manuals, but Scott has a way of clearing things up and making you feel comfortable with the topic. The examples he gives are short but useful in learning the subtle points of the Quartz API.

Next comes a more in-depth look at off-screen drawing, clipping and the masking of images. Scott shows you how to work with PNG, JPEG data, and gives code for importing and exporting other image formats using QuickTime.

I especially like the chapter on Core Image, which isn't covered anywhere else. Scott shows you how to wrap the API in C to gain access to the powerful filters and transition effects provided by Core Image.

This book is not a complete reference or encyclopedia of the Quartz API, (get "Programming with Quartz" by Gelphman & Laden for that). Mac programmers will want both.

This was great for learning quartz in TIGER but a lot of the examples don't compile in Leopard. A lot of stuff is also (bizarrely) written in C++ in Carbon. Almost the first sentence of every other Mac programming book I've ever read was "Use Cocoa and Objective C". Almost every paragraph in the book tells Cocoa programmers where to look for documentation instead. Even the examples that are written in Cocoa are in "Objective-C++" (.mm).

Granted it was a decent introduction to Quartz and drawing, but if you want to take anything out of the book you have to follow the author's links to where to learn about Cocoa, open up your developer library, and translate everything into actual Objective-C yourself.

So unless you plan on developing for Tiger for the rest of your life, stick to Apple's online documentation for learning how to write Mac OS X applications.

OK until you get to chapter 11 on text.

Then it is completely obsolete and useless. Its CD of text display programs will not compile on X-Code 3 or X-Code 4.

I just purchased this book today at the full list price of $49.99. This is too much IMO for a 300 page overview of a graphics system (no matter how well written.) That said, by chapter 2 I've already noticed a number of mistakes not picked up by editors (probably because the words substituted are not incorrectly spelled: ie. 'inherit' instead of 'inherent', or 'combing' instead of 'combining') Maybe I'm just being nitpicky, but I'm growing tired of laziness on the part of publishing houses.

All in all, this is a good introduction to the topic. For the discounted Amazon price, it's worth the money.

If you're buying a book about Quartz, you've probably already read a book about Objective C and Cocoa and you probably already know what a pdf is. Half way through this book, you learn how to draw a circle. I read the whole book, learned nothing new, and am still a feeble programmer in Quartz.

Well presented material. Good overview of state-of-the-art Mac graphics. Simply written. Good reference.