Learning Cocoa

Rating:
Summary: Nothing new here...
Review: Basically a rehash of the documentation that is available on the OS X Developer CD and Apple's web site. Frankly, I think it's shameful that Apple is, on the one hand, chastising developers for not embracing X, while, on the other, failing to document the X development environment. Learning Cocoa covers just the basics while leaving the most intriguing and potentially useful aspects of the environment unexplained. That shouldn't be a surprise, I suppose, since the most popular phrase in the current collection of developer documentation is "Description forthcoming." Sheesh.

Rating:
Summary: Bad Dog!
Review: Dull, dull, dull. Quite literally this is a bunch of documentation you can download from Apple's site bound in a book. Yes, you do learn something, but the ratio of useful information to "type in the program" is awful and it's very dry reading.

Try the Aaron Hillegass book, or the new O'Reilly "Building Cocoa Applications" if you want a useful title on programming Cocoa. I see there's a second edition of this book due in September 2002 - hopefully this'll either pep up the existing content, or add something more (published paper documentation for the Cocoa frameworks is non-existent, probably because some of the on-line documentation I've looked at still has big gaping holes in it - and people wonder why Carbonized apps outnumber those that use Cocoa...)

Rating:
Summary: Bad Dog!
Review: Dull, dull, dull. Quite literally this is a bunch of documentation you can download from Apple's site bound in a book. Yes, you do learn something, but the ratio of useful information to "type in the program" is awful and it's very dry reading.

Try the Aaron Hillegass book, or the new O'Reilly "Building Cocoa Applications" if you want a useful title on programming Cocoa. I see there's a second edition of this book due in September 2002 - hopefully this'll either pep up the existing content, or add something more (published paper documentation for the Cocoa frameworks is non-existent, probably because some of the on-line documentation I've looked at still has big gaping holes in it - and people wonder why Carbonized apps outnumber those that use Cocoa...)

Rating:
Summary: Bad Dog!
Review: Dull, dull, dull. Quite literally this is a bunch of documentation you can download from Apple's site bound in a book. Yes, you do learn something, but the ratio of useful information to "type in the program" is awful and it's very dry reading.

Try the Aaron Hillegass book, or the new O'Reilly "Building Cocoa Applications" if you want a useful title on programming Cocoa. I see there's a second edition of this book due in September 2002 - hopefully this'll either pep up the existing content, or add something more (published paper documentation for the Cocoa frameworks is non-existent, probably because some of the on-line documentation I've looked at still has big gaping holes in it - and people wonder why Carbonized apps outnumber those that use Cocoa...)

Rating:
Summary: cocoa is served
Review: Excellent. This book has just the right doses of tips and tricks, distilled wisdom of the NextStep way, "best practice" Objective-C concepts, solid examples and brevity. If you have been scouring the Cocoa online APIs, stepwise.com, omni lists, etc., but wishing for more then this book with deliver for you. The diagrams and screen shots are first rate, as is the editing. Examples are very easy to follow. My only complaint is I wish there were sections on printing, threading, services, and other Cocoa topics. Of course they can't cover all the APIs. Hopefully some of these will appear in an "advanced" Cocoa book from O'Reilly.

Rating:
Summary: Great Programmer's Guide
Review: Great book. Starts off very basic, but gets coplicated by the end. read this book cover to cover and do every tutorial and you should be ready to venture into the world of MacOS programming.

Rating:
Summary: returned my copy
Review: I am surprised O'REILLY published such a weak book. To keep it short, it is one of those "click here, click there, you are done!" kind of books. I doesn't go much deeper than the Cocoa tutorials on Apple's developer site.

Rating:
Summary: Weak, But Slightly Useful
Review: I bought Learning Cocoa because I assumed, being written by Apple and published by O'Reilly, that it had to be good. Unfortunately, I was rather disappointed.

The book begins with a fairly weak introduction to Objective-C and Cocoa, and then launches into telling you what lines to pound in to Project Builder and what buttons to click in Interface Builder in order to compile programs that Apple has written. While these "tutorials" provide no real room for guided independent development, they do have some worth for learning good Cocoa development procedures and for getting in to the habit of writing Cocoa code.

All in all, Learning Cocoa didn't advance my knowledge very far, and I don't see myself counting on it as a reference at any point in the future. I'd stay away from this one unless you're a Cocoa book collector or something odd like that.

Rating:
Summary: Accessible
Review: I found learning Cocoa to be a good read and I found it easy to understand the concepts covered. Particularly useful is how it covers the integration between project builder and interface builder. Something totally alien.

It gives enough to whet the appetite but unfortunately not enough to fulfill it. Hopefully it will be followed up with an Advanced Cocoa volume. However this doesn't detract from the book since it is only a beginners guide. It is careful to show some useful examples without trying to cram too much in.

Rating:
Summary: For beginner who has some C programming experience
Review: I know right off the bat that this book is a beginner book as are all "learning" series from Oreiley. I'm an experienced programmer with prior experience in NeXTSTEP. So, judging from a beginner's point of view, the "object-oriented programming" chapter is very clear and concise, right to the point. The "Objective-C primer" chapter might need a little bit more work. For a C/C++/Java programmer, it should be easy to read, but it lacks some essential information on some of the syntax.

From an experienced programmer's point of view, this book is too basic although it does give you a good introduction on how to use the tools.

The whole book is pretty much a tutorial. Personally, I think the step-by-step instruction is just way too much. The instructions are usually duplicated in a lot of chapters. You figure that the author should have omitted the basic instructions in the later chapters, but he doesn't.

Anyhow, this is still a good book for beginner. I'd like to see "Programming in Cocoa" come out soon though...

Chris