Product Details
Learning Cocoa with Objective-C

Learning Cocoa with Objective-C
By Apple Computer Inc, James Duncan Davidson

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Product Description

Learning Cocoa with Objective-C is the "must-have" book for people who want to develop applications for Mac OS X, and is the only book approved and reviewed by Apple engineers. Based on the Jaguar release of Mac OS X 10.2, this edition of Learning Cocoa includes examples that use the Address Book and Universal Access APIs. Also included is a handy quick reference card, charting Cocoa's Foundation and AppKit frameworks, along with an Appendix that includes a listing of resources essential to any Cocoa developer--beginning or advanced.

Completely revised and updated, this 2nd edition begins with some simple examples to familiarize you with the basic elements of Cocoa programming as well Apple's Developer Tools, including Project Builder and Interface Builder.

After introducing you to Project Builder and Interface Builder, it brings you quickly up to speed on the concepts of object-oriented programming with Objective-C, the language of choice for building Cocoa applications. From there, each chapter presents a different sample program for you to build, with easy to follow, step-by-step instructions to teach you the fundamentals of Cocoa programming. The techniques you will learn in each chapter lay the foundation for more advanced techniques and concepts presented in later chapters.

You'll learn how to:

  • Effectively use Apple's suite of Developer Tools, including Project Builder and Interface Builder
  • Build single- and multiple-window document-based applications
  • Manipulate text data using Cocoa's text handling capabilities
  • Draw with Cocoa
  • Add scripting functionality to your applications
  • Localize your application for multiple language support
  • Polish off your application by adding an icon for use in the Dock, provide Help, and package your program for distribution
Each chapter ends with a series of Examples, challenging you to test your newly-learned skills by tweaking the application you've just built, or to go back to an earlier example and add to it some new functionality. Solutions are provided in the Appendix, but you're encouraged to learn by trying.

Extensive programming experience is not required to complete the examples in the book, though experience with the C programming language will be helpful. If you are familiar with an object-oriented programming language such as Java or Smalltalk, you will rapidly come up to speed with the Objective-C language. Otherwise, basic object-oriented and language concepts are covered where needed.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #269408 in Books
  • Published on: 2002-09-20
  • Original language: English
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 384 pages

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Davidson is a freelance author, speaker, and software consultant, focusing on Mac OS X, Java, and XML technologies.

Customer Reviews

A good book, but not the best book3
A very popular book, and greatly improved in its second edition. Very example and tutorial oriented; somewhat out of date at this point, however.  Helps the user learn Interface Builder, ProjectBuilder and Objective-C, too. Possibly a bit shallow to get the reader writing their own Cocoa programs from scratch, but a good introduction. Ultimately, probably not as recommended for a first purchase as Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish or Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass.

Indispensible Guide for Moving from C to Object Orientation5
Being an old Pascal and C programer from the earlier Mac OS (systems 6 and 7) I was finding 1) that Carbon documentation was a mess, and 2) that Cocoa's object orientation was incomprehensible. So, in deciding which environment to work in to upgrade my old scientific apps, I felt stuck between two impossible choices. I wanted the power of quartz and the familiarity of C in a format I could learn. This book provides the indispensible introduction to object orientation that is a prerequisite for Cocoa and ultimately Apple's latest and greatest stuff under the hood. From there, the developer documentation and Garfinkel's or Hillegrass' books can take you the rest of the way. But, this is the place to start if you're conversant in c but not objects.

Good try, but needs a bit more work3
This book needed one more pass by the proofreaders. There are an annoyingly large number of typographical errors and other mistakes. What surprised me is that after introducing a number of features of Interface Builder, the author tends to manually write code (e.g., outlet declarations) then load the results into Interface Builder to make the various object connections. It would have been better in my view to simply use Interface Builder to perform these tasks (certainly less error prone).

Overall, the book is helpful in explaining a lot of issues, but I would have like the book to touch more in internationalization issues, such as how to handle input method editors and product localization. In real world programing, I'll need internationalization and input method editor handling before I need to worry about speech synthesis.