Learning Carbon

Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: Along with Apples own Inside Mac Os X series, which can be downloaded from their website as pdfs, Learning Carbon is THE essential guide to learn, understand and most of all program in Carbon.

It contain many tutorials you can follow to build your own project, and it's really fun too! Let's just hope that they'll release more books about programming Carbon/Cocoa, and some books about C,C++ and Java, so we REALLY can program well!

Rating:
Summary: Well written but simply too short and too simplistic
Review: If your a beginner who wants to learn just enough about Carbon to get by this might be the right book for you, so long as you use it along with Apples excellent Inside Mac OS X documentation and Project Builder. However if you are looking for a more detailed book which covers pretty much everything you need to know but were afraid to ask I would recommend Carbon Programming by Kevin Bricknell which is about 10 times longer. Learning Carbon is not a bad book, it will give you a good grasp of the "feel" of Carbon and is an excellent guide to Apples Developer Tools but it is neither an extensive tutorial nor a particularly good reference.

Rating:
Summary: Back to basics, A gentle introduction
Review: Learning Carbon is a gentle introduction to the very basics of Carbon programming. It carries the reader over the foothills of Carbon development to give them a solid grounding in the fundamental concepts of the API. This book will also be of some value to application developers who are already familiar with the classic Mac OS programming APIs but who need to know about the nuances and special flavors that the Carbon application framework adds to the Mac OS.

As other reviewers have pointed out, this document covers many of the same areas as Apple's on-line developer documentation, but the value of the text is that it collects that documentation into one place and ties it together into a cohesive tutorial. The text is also able to go into a little more depth on some topics than the on-line documentation.

If you're looking for a comprehensive reference text, this book is not going to help you, but if you need to know about the fundamentals of developing applications with the Carbon framework then this book can teach them to you.

Rating:
Summary: Back to basics, A gentle introduction
Review: Learning Carbon is a gentle introduction to the very basics of Carbon programming. It carries the reader over the foothills of Carbon development to give them a solid grounding in the fundamental concepts of the API. This book will also be of some value to application developers who are already familiar with the classic Mac OS programming APIs but who need to know about the nuances and special flavors that the Carbon application framework adds to the Mac OS.

As other reviewers have pointed out, this document covers many of the same areas as Apple's on-line developer documentation, but the value of the text is that it collects that documentation into one place and ties it together into a cohesive tutorial. The text is also able to go into a little more depth on some topics than the on-line documentation.

If you're looking for a comprehensive reference text, this book is not going to help you, but if you need to know about the fundamentals of developing applications with the Carbon framework then this book can teach them to you.

Rating:
Summary: I hope there is better on the way...
Review: This book disappointed me - I read the online docs that became "Learning Cocoa", and liked them quite a bit, so I expected a similar book in "Learning Carbon". I was wrong.

I bought both as hard copies because the Cocoa one was such a great little reference, but this book contains a number of errors in the samples, doesn't cover a lot of very relevant details, and doesn't give you a good "feel" for the Carbon API. I learned more reading through the headers for a few hours than I did from reading this book.

Rating:
Summary: I hope there is better on the way...
Review: This book disappointed me - I read the online docs that became "Learning Cocoa", and liked them quite a bit, so I expected a similar book in "Learning Carbon". I was wrong.

I bought both as hard copies because the Cocoa one was such a great little reference, but this book contains a number of errors in the samples, doesn't cover a lot of very relevant details, and doesn't give you a good "feel" for the Carbon API. I learned more reading through the headers for a few hours than I did from reading this book.

Rating:
Summary: I hope there is better on the way...
Review: This book disappointed me - I read the online docs that became "Learning Cocoa", and liked them quite a bit, so I expected a similar book in "Learning Carbon". I was wrong.

I bought both as hard copies because the Cocoa one was such a great little reference, but this book contains a number of errors in the samples, doesn't cover a lot of very relevant details, and doesn't give you a good "feel" for the Carbon API. I learned more reading through the headers for a few hours than I did from reading this book.

Rating:
Summary: Great Start on MacOS X Programming!
Review: This is the perfect book to get if you want to get started programming the Mac (OS X or OS 9). The Mac has two API's, Cocoa and Carbon. There is absolutely no difference in your application's performance when it comes to these two API's because they are based on the same internal code for OS X (Darwin). If you want to learn Cocoa, don't waste your money on the "Learning Cocoa" book, just go to Apple's online documentation and do the tutorials (they're the same as the book!).

Rating:
Summary: Not quite shovelware, but hardly worth the price
Review: Want to learn to write an application that runs in Mac OS X or Mac OS 9? You could buy this book... or you could look on your hard drive.

As shovelware goes, I've seen far worse -- Sun apparently thinks Java developers will pay $... or more for books that reprint freely-available API javadocs -- but "Learning Carbon" can't shake the fact that at least half of its contents are already installed as a part of the Mac OS X development tools.

Specifically, chapters 2-8 and 12 are substantially a rewrite of the PDF file "Moon Travel Tutorial: Creating a Carbon Application" that is installed with the Mac OS X dev tools (in the directory /Developer/Documentation/Carbon/pdf).

The rewrite is helpful, as it seems more aimed at non-Mac developers, taking time to explain concepts that are carried over from earlier versions of Mac OS. And the other chapters do address topics not directly handled by the "Moon Travel" PDF, such as property lists, printing, and file I/O.

Unfortunately, the book feels as much a tutorial on writing Carbon code with one specific tool, Apple's free "Project Builder", than on Carbon itself. I don't know that this book provides enough info for a developer to write Carbon apps with CodeWarrior, the most popular Mac development tool.

Hopefully, future Apple/O'Reilly books will feature more original content and at a greater level of detail. The Carbon API's are huge, and merit both tutorial-style and reference-style books.

It's understandable that "Learning Carbon" could have been rushed out as shovelware to give developers something to work with as soon as possible following the release of Mac OS X, but from companies with such good reputations as Apple and O'Reilly, it's surely a disappointment.