Recommended reading.
Oliver Jones
As I said in my previous post, I'm reading Aaron Hillegass'
Programming Cocoa book (3rd ed). And I have Programming in Objective-
C.
Any other Mac Programming books people can recommend?
Regards
Mark Bate
Hillegass actually has 2 books on OS X programming.
The second one he co-wrote with Mark Dalrymple, it's now titled
"Advanced Mac OS X Programming", it used to be titled "Core Mac OS X
and Unix Programming".
I haven't had a chance to get much into my copy yet, but from what I
can see it basically steps away from Cocoa, and goes more in depth
about things that would be fairly brushed over in the Cocoa book.
Stuff like tweaking compilers and debuggers, networking, memory, i/o,
multi-threading, daemons, etc..
If you're hardcore about optimising everything to the Nth degree, and
want to understand how absolutely everything works, or you just want
to know more on certain areas it could be worth a read.
If you're into the whole knowing about Mac OS X internals and how to
manipulate them Singh's book "Mac OS X Internals" is pretty good too.
It covers pretty much every aspect of Tiger (as far as I know not
updated for Leopard yet).
back in Cocoa, the O'Reilly book "Cocoa in a Nutshell" is a pretty
good quick reference as well.. but to be honest I think a lot of it
could probably be found trawling through the Objective-C docs.
I also bought one of those books by the guys who put out the ones with
the purple spines.. I can't remember exactly the book is on my desk at
work.. I believe it's called "Programmin in Objective-C".
I probably wouldn't recommend it to anyone that's programmed in any
Object Oriented language before.. probably the first 7 chapters or so
are just covering the very basics of Object-Oriented Programming.
If you're new to the concepts then it'd probably be pretty good fit,
but otherwise it's painful to read something that feels dumbed down.
hopefully that helps,
mark
Gareth Townsend
the Pragmatic Programmers (http://www.pragprog.com) are quite good
from what I have read of each so far.
RubyCocoa: http://www.pragprog.com/titles/bmrc/rubycocoa
Core Animation: http://www.pragprog.com/titles/bdcora/core-animation-for-os-x
Both are in beta however so you need to have an open mind when reading
the pdf's as there are some mistakes in them. Nothing that isn't too
difficult to figure out.
And while I haven't purchased it yet the pragprog screen casts on Core
Animation are probably worth a look in as well.
http://www.pragprog.com/screencasts/v-bdcora/creating-a-compelling-user-interface-with-core-animation
Mark Bate
now that I'm at my desk at work I can say the purple book I
recommended for n00bs, but not necessarily for the more 1337 out there
is Kochan's "Programming in Objective-C", it's part of the Developer's
Library series.
But yeah read it with a grain of salt.. I read the "Advanced PHP
Programming" one a while back, when PHP 5 was pretty new and shiny..
and disagreed with a lot of the stuff the writer had to say, as most
of it was carried from PHP 4 and there were better ways of doing in
PHP 5. That being said, pretty sure they are 2 different authors.
But yeah, thanks Gareth for the Core Anim & the RubyCocoa ones.. will
have to grab at some stage.
Is there any visual guys out there who might know of good paths to
take for entering the world of Quartz? looking at playing with it for
some after hours stuff.. if anyone knows any good books that'd be
great, and would probably save Luke Toop from getting a lot of random
emails ;p
thanks,
mark
Oliver Jones
books already. The Advanced Mac OS X Programming book (from Amazon
reviews) sounds like something that deals more with the Posix/BSD
parts of Mac OS X. Most of that stuff is pretty old hat to me as that
is where I cut my C programming teeth.
Might pick it up at some point for info on anything that is Mac OS
specific. But I imagine most of that would be covered by ADC
articles.