Rating:  Summary: Try a different book first. Review: This book has potential, but in general I am pretty dissatisfied.Good things: (1) It is pretty well thought-out. (2) The progression through 4 projects is good. (3) There is working code for the examples available online. Bad things: (1) The book is riddled with errors. If you include the unofficial errata from OReilly's Website, the book becomes about 200% more usable. (2) Why has this book not been reprinted? At LEAST OReilly should have released an official errata for this book at this point!!! (3) This book does NOT cover 10.3 and the XCode software (still uses project builder). In most cases this is ok and you can figure much of it out. However, there are times that the differences are too significant to overcome without a lot of effort. -- I have been very happy with O'Reilly books in the past, but this one is substandard. I would recommend trying a different book unless this one is overhauled.
Rating:  Summary: Excellent introduction to Cocoa programming Review: This book is an excellent book to learn Cocoa programming from. The writing is clear and complete. I haven't seen many programming books that go this in depth from a beginner's stand point to an intermediate level. I would definately recommend this book as a starting point for anyone interested in mastering Cocoa programming.
Rating:  Summary: Content OK; Needs Editing Review: This book's content is all right. The authors have a writing style that keeps you moving along. Unfortunately, the numerous editing errors (both in the text and in the code) keep tripping you up. I gave up after finding many, many errors, both of simple grammar/punctuation/spelling, and of the more serious coding sort, in the first five chapters. So many of the things they tell you are just wrong. Examples contradict what is written in the previous paragraph. Sometimes it appears as though someone's search-and-replace went wild and the wrong word appears repeatedly in a paragraph. And on and on. This is another disappointing Cocoa book from O'Reilly. I hope they will stop rushing things and make sure the next one is done right.
Rating:  Summary: Building Cocoa Applications is great! Review: This is a great book, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to develop applications for Mac OS X. It covers a wide range of Cocoa programming topics, from the basics of the various Cocoa developer tools through more-complex topics like multiprocessing, multithreading, and system-wide services. I really like the authors' approach to presenting the example programs. Although small example programs are used for some topics, they present most of the programming topics through 3 larger applications. Each application (Calculator, MathPaper, GraphPaper) is built up over several chapters, which helps the reader tie the topics together and see how the various concepts interoperate. At the end of each major section of the book, you have an application that is actually useful, rather than a bunch of small programs that just demonstrate individual programming concepts. The book assumes no prior knowledge of Macintosh-based programming, although it does assume some general programming knowledge as well as knowledge of the ANSI C programming language. If you're serious about developing applications for Mac OS X, buy this book. You won't be sorry.
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