Customer Reviews

Xcode 3 Unleashed

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

 

 

As another reviewer so kindly mentioned, this book is not for those new to programming, objective-c, or object oriented development. It is Perfect for those of us with a strong background in development that are looking for a walkthrough of the Xcode development environment.

This book makes an excellent followup to Cocoa- Programming for Mac- OS X, Third edition This text moves well beyond cocoa development theory into giving readers a very visual (tons of color screenshots and diagrams) tour of the XCode environment by walking them step-by-step through building a project that implements most of the features that beginning cocoa developers will want to know about when trying to break into the OSX Development world.

One of the biggest plusses about this book has to be the attention given to the Debugger, Unit Testing, Memory Mangement, Instruments and other performance tools. It's information I didn't know how to find before reading this text, and it has given me a greater knowledge about how to better tune my apps and what to pay more attention to while coding.

Overall I would highly recommend picking up Xcode 3 Unleashed to anybody who is seriously considering making an entry into the world of Apple software development. There are too few books on Apple dev, and the fact is that a majority of them are outdated and useless as of Xcode 3 except for theory. This book is a fresh look at Apples latest development environment and I would encourage you to pick it up and get started--it's a great read.

For those of you interested in picking up Xcode skills for iPhone development, this is really a great getting started point for learning the IDE, getting your hands dirty with proper MVC, and learning how to debug and tune your apps. It is definitely worth the read and perhaps a bit more in line with your goals of learning the apple development environment than the Hillegass book. (I wish I had started here first)

And thanks go to Fritz, by the way, for taking the time to create such an in depth tutorial to what is becoming a teriffic development environment from Apple.

I was given this book by being a member of the Des Moines Cocoaheads group, and as a new developer on the Mac, I was very grateful for it. While other books provide a better introduction to Cocoa and Objective-C, Xcode 3 Unleashed fills a gap by providing detailed explanations of the Xcode IDE itself.

I was able to immediately make use of Chapter 8, Version Control, in my project. That chapter alone is almost worth the cost of the book. It steps you through creating a local repository, adding your project to the repository, committing changes, comparing files, and rolling back changes. After using the built in subversion support in Xcode, relying on Time Machine for version control seems archaic.

Fritz Anderson also spends a good deal of time introducing Xcode to developers more familiar with UNIX and Linux development. Chapter 21 is dedicated to "make Veterans", and explains how Xcode builds a project under the hood. This book also includes separate chapters for using the included debugging and optimization tools like Shark and Instruments.

The last thing I'd like to say about the book is that it is beautifully laid out. Full color illustrations and syntax highlighting that matches the default Xcode editor really make the book stand out. I do not think Xcode 3 Unleashed should be the first book you read getting started in Cocoa development, but it is certainly towards the top of the list. I would recommend learning C first, then Objective-C, and then moving into the IDE. You are much more likely to appreciate all that Xcode does for you after that.

This is a great book. It is not a pure Cocoa Development book, although it does cover some aspects of Cocoa Development. This goes into all the critical pieces of XCode, i.e. the IDE, Debugger, Source Control, Instrumentation, etc.

Very well illustrated with great layou. I've been a developer for almost 20 years. Have lots of development books. This ranks up there with the best. Makes a perfect companion to Aaron Hillegrass's "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" 3RD EDITION. If you're new to Mac OS X Cocoa and iPhone development, the learning curve is steep, but these two books will get you on your way. Have Fun!

This book is definitely not for those new to Mac development. I'm a C++/C# dev from the MS side of the spectrum who decided to try and get some experience with Mac development. This book was a very poor choice for my introduction.

Having come from the MS world, I'm used to a certain quality in terms of how concepts are laid out and examples are structured in a book. In this book, I found the examples needlessly complicated and poorly explained. Instead of neatly organizing lists of tasks for a project, and separating out explaination of more abstract concepts relative to the language and environment, everything is mixed together in no particular order. It reminded me of listening to a colleague at work who has ADD explain something. Any given paragraph might have a task (usually 1 of many), mixed in with a partial explanation of a concept, mixed in with information about the environment or OSX, mixed in with the authors personal feelings on the matter. It was painful to try and navigate through. I felt as though it wasn't properly proofread by the publisher before being released.

There's no doubt that the author knows XCode and Mac programming inside and out, but his ability to articulate his experience and skill into something that can be consumed by others leaves something to be desired.

It likely would have been easier if I were a veteran Mac dev using this as a way to brush up on the latest and greatest, but for someone new to the platform, this is a horrible choice.

I wish I would have purchased this book several years ago! It is an outstanding, comprehensive walk-thru of the entire Xcode 3.0 integrated development environment. This is money well spent, and introduces you to not just the build environment, but many other Apple development tools as well. I'm shocked at how much power is available in Xcode that I was oblivious to. This book points it all out with examples.

Beautiful book. Every page is printed in brilliant color. You wouldn't think it would make a difference -- but it does! Full color makes examples, notes, warnings, and screen shots pop off the page. The paper is thick and bright too.

NOTE: This is a book about the IDE; it is not a book about learning to program or any development language. Ignore reviews from folks who are disappointed that this book doesn't teach them how to program in Objective C or the OS X Cocoa framework. That is not the intention of this book.

NOTE 2: This book is slightly out of date now that Xcode 3.1 has been released. Don't knock the book, as it was released prior to Xcode 3.1's release.

I have previously developed software for windows using Visual Basic and Delphi and C. Now that I am a Mac convert I tried to learn software development using Xcode. This book says Beginner-to-Experienced. First the book chooses exceedingly complicated code for it's introduction that could be totally avoided and still teach the points intended. Second it makes the excuse that some of the techniques "look like magic if you aren't experienced in the underlying technology". Well YA! I am not experienced in this technology, that's why I bought the book!

Very poor for learning Xcode unless you have already been writing on the Mac (which means you probably already know Xcode!)

This is not a "Learn Objective-C Book" as the title should suggest. I bought this after reading a few reviews that seemed to indicate otherwise but in actual fact this book focuses on teaching you how to use X-Code and in that it does a very good job.

The text is easy to read and professionally laid out, I quite enjoyed the book even though it was not exactly what I had expected. That said I gave this book 4 stars since some of the examples (especially if you don't know Objective-C that well) could have had better explanations and continuity. At one point I had to go to the CD to compare between their source and mine to find a problem.

All in all this is a very good book for someone looking to learn how to use X-Code so ignore any reviews that tell you otherwise.

I started this book, hoping to get a quick, friendly glimpse into how to use the new IDE and how to use Objective-C. I know that the book made no promises about to use ObjC, but I felt confident in my abilities to pick up the language itself. An introduction to the IDE was all I felt would be needed, so long as the use of the IDE also included early solid examples of ObjC and Xcode.

What I found early was a unwieldy example of cobbling together an interface and using a command line binary as the core of the executable. While nice, I didn't think this was necessary as an introductory example for a few reasons. One, it doesn't make mention early on about generic programming for common cases. Writing that command line app, then using pipes to get input to, and output from, this seemed unnecessarily advanced and esoteric. Two, some of the language was a bit abrupt and harsh, and some passages were brief and exclusionary. Lastly, the approaches used in that early example seemed to break with the more strict Model-View-Controller design pattern that is strongly encouraged for OS X development. To start with something that seems like an uncommon situation was not my take on a good start to proper future development.

Maybe this book is more suited to developers of older versions of Xcode, but for a beginner, I recommend starting elsewhere.

Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition)

In his introduction, the author states that he designed the book to be useful for both experienced developers and those new to OS X. In this it must be said that he failed. It is not possible for an inexperienced OS X developer to follow the examples in this book without a lot of extra help. Some of the difficulty in this lies in the poor editing job that SAMS does: missing code, rearranged paragraphs, are just a couple of the editing issues. Several times I could not understand something and only after giving up and going on did I find it explained a paragraph or 2 further along. And there was NO troubleshooting help when things didn't work.
On the plus side, if you are familiar with OS X development, this is a good course in learning how to use all the different features that XCode 3 provides. So if you read the title and ignore the introductory exaggeration, this book can be a good tool for the right developer

I needed a clear description of how to get xcode working with SVN. The chapter on SVN stepped me through it. Not every instruction was precisely correct, but it was close enough for me to get it working pretty easily.