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This is not a bad introduction to Macintosh programming, but seeing as it was written right on the edge of the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, it has a lot of information that is now out of date. For starters, it focuses on the REALbasic development environment, which is a good environment that has gone through a few revisions since the book was published. The included trial version of REALbasic is obsolete, and if you download the latest trial version you will have to become familiar with it before you can do the examples in the book. That's a shame, because the examples are very friendly walk-throughs that just don't work with the latest REALbasic IDE. What's more, the trial version is only good for 15 days, and any programs you create with it will quit after 5 minutes of use - but that's not the fault of the authors, those are the terms set by REAL Software. I'm glad that REAL is helping to promote Mac development, but I find their restrictive demo to be more annoying than useful. The standard version costs $99. The only recommendation I can give REALbasic over Apple's free tools is that it's easier for Visual Basic programmers to learn REALbasic than Objective C.

I have only worked halfway through the book, but that's enough for me to see that the book is written in a style helpful to beginners, which gives good explanations for programming terminology and the user interface elements the reader will be working with. My biggest gripe is that it gives the reader a solid introduction to good programming practices, including specifications and documentation, and then follows up with a tutorial that ignores those practices. Each example takes you step-by-step through the creation of a "Paint" program, without giving any explanation of the what tools you'll be using or why. Despite the good advice that the reader use flow charts and code comments, there are none to be found in the tutorial. You are given no idea how to plan the project - instead you have to work through the examples and find out what comes out at the end. The bright side is that structured programming, functions, and objects are all explained ahead of time - it's just that the authors don't explain in advance which structures, functions, and objects REALbasic offers you, and which you will be using. There is also little indication of where you can find the information you need in help files or online documentation.

The coverage of Classic, Cocoa and Carbon is pretty good for an introductory book, but you'll have to look elsewhere if you want any in-depth descriptions of the interfaces or tools available. This section also suffers from obsolescence now that XCode has replaced Project Builder as Apple's development environment of choice. There is some discussion of cross-platform development with Java, Windows and Unix, but it's barely enough to whet the reader's appetite -not enough to even experiment with.

Overall, this is a book that falls in the middle ground between being a friendly beginner's book and an experienced developer's introduction to the Mac, but worth a look anyway if you want to try your hand at Mac programming. I wouldn't pay full price, though.

This book starts with a short primer on RealBasic. The second section is a tutorial. The tutorial is poorly explained, however. As a complete beginner, I found complex code with no explanation and often "magic code." Magic code appears in the project without ever being introduced in the tutorial. There are multiple errors in the tutorial as well. I guess it is good practice to be able to debug on your own.
Finally, the tutorial uses very few of the techniques available to RealBasic. The tutorial that comes with RealBasic is much better.

The last few chapters talk about Cocoa and Carbon and give a very good overview, but this space could have been used to make the tutorial much better.