Rating: 
Summary: this weak book betrays it's title
Review: As a C developer of Mac & Win software, I bought this book hoping it would be of some help for porting an existing MacOS application (written in C) to Carbon/Mach-O.This book is worthless for C/C++ developers. This book is biased toward new projects written in Objective-C & the Cocoa framework. It ignores C, pushing the objective-c language instead. The first 100 pages deal with topics as worthless as "what is a programmer" and "the history of the mac os" ... Who cares? Teach me about the Event Manager and Quickdraw vs. Quartz. Did you know that this book makes NO mention of Quartz and only has one page number listed for "Darwin" (pg 141). I've already returned it and I'm now looking for something else.
Rating:
Summary: this weak book betrays it's title
Review: As a C developer of Mac & Win software, I bought this book hoping it would be of some help for porting an existing MacOS application (written in C) to Carbon/Mach-O. This book is worthless for C/C++ developers. This book is biased toward new projects written in Objective-C & the Cocoa framework. It ignores C, pushing the objective-c language instead. The first 100 pages deal with topics as worthless as "what is a programmer" and "the history of the mac os" ... Who cares? Teach me about the Event Manager and Quickdraw vs. Quartz. Did you know that this book makes NO mention of Quartz and only has one page number listed for "Darwin" (pg 141). I've already returned it and I'm now looking for something else.
Rating:
Summary: 0 stars
Review: Disappointed. This book is worthless. The author should not try to write a book while smoking dope. The first half of the book is a Mac-is-great commercial. The last half of the book is a Mac-is-great commercial. Yes, I know the Mac-is-great, I love the Mac, Macs are cool, Macs are usefull, rah rah rah. Unfortunately, the book is content free. No actual developers were involved in the production of this book; no actual developers were informed by reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: 0 stars
Review: Disappointed. This book is worthless. The author should not try to write a book while smoking dope. The first half of the book is a Mac-is-great commercial. The last half of the book is a Mac-is-great commercial. Yes, I know the Mac-is-great, I love the Mac, Macs are cool, Macs are usefull, rah rah rah. Unfortunately, the book is content free. No actual developers were involved in the production of this book; no actual developers were informed by reading this book.
Rating: 
Summary: A 580 page overview, A Developers Introduction
Review: I may be the wrong person to write a review on this book. As an OS X developer, much of the info in this book can be found in Apple's website, in Apple's (free) technical documentation, and at WWDC. A "Developer's Introduction" is a better title for this book. If your brand spanking fresh to OS X (where have you been?), buy the book! Otherwise, consider "Carbon Programming"..that book doesn't mess around.
Rating:
Summary: Waste of good trees
Review: It is a large book, which might entice some to buy the tome on the theory that there must be _something_ of value in so many pages. Such a theory would be dead wrong in my opinion. What little of real value that might be gleaned is so overwhelmed by useless blithering that finding the nuggets, if indeed there are any, would be way too time consuming to justify the effort. I used the sparse index to search out possible answers for a host of issues that are still bugging me, and found zip in the way of enlightenment. Indeed, if the word superficial did not already exist it would have to be coined to describe this mish-mash. A pox on the author, the publisher, and anyone else involved in this miserable misadventure. This waste of trees is nothing more that a con to pry money from the hands of folks frustrated by Apple's hit-or-miss documentation and seemingly total indifference to beginners like me, although Apple (and O'reilly) can now take comfort in knowing that their marginal at best effort, "Learning Cocoa," is no longer the bottom of a very shallow and muddy barrel.
Rating:
Summary: I can't see a target audience
Review: Lots of paper, but not much information. Many things are scrated on the surface, but not in a way you can really use something. As an experienced developer on other plattforms (Java,--ix) I wanted an overview of the OS and the API's. The book failed here totally. I think I got 2 usefull snippets of information from the first 300 pages, when I decided its a waste of time, to go on. And additionally some Java-examples are close to wrong (the reflection example).
Rating: 
Summary: A Differing Opinion
Review: Obviously, every author has a particular audience in mind; and this book is clearly targeted towards the beginner. Consequently, you should ignore *all* of the previous and discouraging reviews on this page, as they were written by serious Mac OS X Developers who were looking for the documentation that Apple hasn't written yet, and appear to be annoyed that Jesse Feiler hasn't taken on that Herculean task! Mr. Feiler has provided a good book for the beginner. If you are looking for a "one-stop-shopping" that consolidates a lot of information scattered throughout various web sites across the internet, and provides plentiful examples in both Java and Objective-C, then you could do far worse than this book. If you read through it faithfully, then you will inevitably outgrow it at some point, and then *will* need to supplement it with information from Apple's Cocoa Development site. Just to clarify, I am not related to or indeed even know Mr. Feiler exept through his writing, and have no relationship whatsoever with Morgan Kaufmann. Rather, I am just a satisfied reader.
Rating:
Summary: A Differing Opinion
Review: Obviously, every author has a particular audience in mind; and this book is clearly targeted towards the beginner. Consequently, you should ignore *all* of the previous and discouraging reviews on this page, as they were written by serious Mac OS X Developers who were looking for the documentation that Apple hasn't written yet, and appear to be annoyed that Jesse Feiler hasn't taken on that Herculean task! Mr. Feiler has provided a good book for the beginner. If you are looking for a "one-stop-shopping" that consolidates a lot of information scattered throughout various web sites across the internet, and provides plentiful examples in both Java and Objective-C, then you could do far worse than this book. If you read through it faithfully, then you will inevitably outgrow it at some point, and then *will* need to supplement it with information from Apple's Cocoa Development site. Just to clarify, I am not related to or indeed even know Mr. Feiler exept through his writing, and have no relationship whatsoever with Morgan Kaufmann. Rather, I am just a satisfied reader.
Rating: 
Summary: More a philosophy guide for OS X development
Review: OK, so three stars could be seen as generous, but this book is not all bad, as some reviewers suggest. Firstly, this book contains some history of the subject area. When I brought this book I was looking for something that would help me understand the pros and cons of the different approaches to programming for OS X in C/C++, JAVA or COCOA. If you are new to COCOA & OS X programming, then this book certainly helps. The book then attempts to give you comparative programming advice for C++ and COCOA - but I've read better programming texts. In terms of useful information content, this book does not justify it thickness. What this book is not is a comprehensive guide to programming for OS X. However it did answer the "C++ or COCOA" question that I had.
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