Customer Reviews

Learning Cocoa with Objective-C

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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 Very example and tutorial oriented; somewhat out of date at this point, however.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.

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.

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.

I thought the examples throughout the chapters and follow-up exercises were good. However, the author's explanations leave much to be desired. I'm very experienced at object oriented programming languages, yet there are passages within this book that make little sense to me. Basically, I felt as if the author sacrificed completeness for brevity. This is pretty much what other reviewers have said. I wish I would have heeded their warnings prior to buying this book. My advice is to pass on this book for something better.

When I started this book, I had no knowlege of Cocoa (aside from the first version, which stank(stunk?)), or any programming besides Applescript.
This book seemed to know that, and didn't pretend that I had been a programmer for five years. The book got me familiar to Cocoa in probably the best way, and it's short, allowing me to find my next source of info. In short, whether you've programmed before (you probably want to have done some Applescript or BASIC first, though) or are a novice, this can get you started with a very powerful, easy language. it was kinda fun, too. I am not an adult.

This book is very good. It is much, much better than the first edition. It is very well written and easy to read. The examples are clear and their appear to be no major mistakes at all. The book does an effective job of introducing the reader to the major points of Cocoa programming. It gives you enough information to start writing simple programs by yourself. I believe this book is excellent preparation for the more advanced Cocoa books.

This book is a clear learn by example introduction to Cocoa but is neither complete nor exhustive (which is obvious from the title keyword "Learning xyz"). You will not become a master of cocoa nor totally understand all aspects of Project Builder or Interface Builder. That will take time, patience and more books. This is a good introduction.

Do not pay attention to the reviewer that suggested that the Davidson could learn something from Steve Oualline's Practical C++ Programming (O'Reilly). That book (which I also learned to program from initially) is quite bad and is filled with errors in examples and a very poor introduction to object oriented programming. What the reader should keep in mind is that this is an introduction a development system which is very complex and offers a great deal of power. Learning C/C++ is fairly straightforward. As an application framework I feel the learn by example format provides the fastest possible way to learn what the setup is. If you are unable to develop at least simple programs after this book then you may have to face the fact that the fault may not lie with the book but with your progamming knowledge in general.

One more thing, if you are serious about learning cocoa then I can't recommend highly enough getting one of the class browser programs AppKiDo (which i prefer) or Cocoa Browser. They will only bring you joy.

After reading the first edition, I wasn't at all interested in buying the second edition until I read a review that indicated that the second edition wasn't just an updated rehash of the first. Indeed, this book is completely different. Where the first book was little more than Apple's online examples in print, this book incorporates step-by-step examples of simple applications that are used to demonstrate numerous Cocoa programming topics. I got almost nothing out of the first book. I am actually feeling somewhat confident and I am making progress on a couple of projects with the knowledge I have gained from this edition.

Learning Cocoa with Objective-C presents a clear series of short examples that demonstrate many key aspects of Cocoa. The writing style is direct, and free from distracting stories or other fluff. I first purchased Hillegass' book, but started to become flustered with some of the examples which implemented concepts that had yet to be explained.

I then purchased Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish which gave me great insight into the Cocoa concepts. After reading about half of Anguish's book I returned to the Hillegass book to get me hands dirty with some of the tutorials again, but I just couldn't get into the style of the book.

I then picked up Learning Cocoa and found great relief in the clean format of the book. While the topics discussed aren't explored to a great depth, I feel that such brevity is appropriate for a tutorial book. Davidson does a good job of keeping the examples short and to the point (shaving literally pages off the Currency Converter example which is also presented in Apples docs).

My recommendation would be to buy this book as a tutorial and buy Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish for reference and deeper exploration.

I have seen what is to be had from a good programming book in Steve Oualline's Practical C++ Programming (O'Reilly). One who works himself through a book such as this will find that he is able to move immediately beyond the scope of the textual examples into programs which he himself finds useful. The material is well-taught, in normal English, and confusing issues are solved by reviewing the text. Unfortunately, this is hardly the case with Learning Cocoa. Having read this book, I find that J.D. Davidson explains things poorly, speaks too often in a manner which some might consider advertisement of Apple's tools, and does not prepare one to apply what he has learned to his own purposes. I could not, as a result, recommend this book to anyone of my background (I learned to program C++ by Oualline's book, then came to Learning Cocoa).

Davidson has a habit of "teaching" Cocoa in the following manner:

1. Create a project named x.
2. create these header and implementation files.
3. Copy the code I have written here in this book.
4. Read the explanation line-by-line which I have given you.

The result of this system is that Davidson has successfully explained why his example programs run, but he has utterly failed to teach the reader to create a program which applies the topics he just touched on. Line-by-line explanations are only useful if they serve the purpose of abstraction, to create a model which can then be applied to a specific case. Davidson's explanations serve only his individual examples, as is obvious when a beginning programmer attempts to create his own application.

It is also altogether too clear that Davidson is working under Apple's hand. At every opportunity, the phrase, "Apple has provided," or, "Apple's engineers created," is concatenated at the front end of a sentence for no reason other than to irritate the reader with what amounts to advertisement in a textbook. For example, at the beginning of the novel, Davidson attempts to explain objects. What does he use as a decidedly abstract example? An "Apple" iPod. This may seem nitpicky at first, but I find it very distracting and detrimental to the content.

Lastly, it bears mentioning that this novel does not provide one with the means to move on. Halfway through the text, I was still not able to create my own programs, even of the most rudimentary kind, without intense difficulty and little help from the novel. Re-reading explanations is not helpful, as few of them are made abstract enough to assist a body in any of his own pursuits. Davidson must have understood this when he created the novel, because none of the exercises he provides go beyond one-line modifications. In effect, this book provides no semblance of applicable knowledge.

A book that provides neither content nor focus nor a place from which to move on does not deserve the exhaustive hours required to read it. I have not yet explored other alternatives in the Cocoa programming world, however I strongly suggest that others look elsewhere.