Title:** Building Cocoa Applications : A Step by Step Guide **Author: Simson Garfinkel, Mike Mahoney Publisher:** O’Reilley & Associates **Release Date: May 2002 List Price:** $44.95 **ISBN: 0596002351

Description: Building Cocoa Applications takes a step-by-step approach to teaching developers how to build real graphics applications using Cocoa. By showing the basics of an application in one chapter and then layering additional functionality onto that application in subsequent chapters, the book keeps readers interested and motivated. Readers will see immediate results, and then go on to build onto what they’ve already achieved. By the end of the book, readers who have built the applications as they have read will have a solid understanding of what it really means to develop complete and incrementally more complex Cocoa applications. *See http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/buildcocoa/ for more info…

*Sample Chapter for the Book: Here’s a sample chapter for this book in which you build a nice working aqua-style calculator: * http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/buildcocoa/chapter/ch05.html *

Amazon Link:** http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596002351/002-8450012-5498402 **Barnes & Noble Link: http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0596002351 *O’Reilly & Associates Link: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/buildcocoa/

—-Comments—-

*I found this book to be too much of a rehash of an old Nextstep book. There are places where the book says that Cocoa is an operating system. Some of the other books are a much better place to get information from. Learning Cocoa (the second edition!) for beginners and Cocoa Programming for more advanced readers would be better books to buy.

*WmMoss: Good introductory chapters. Covers a wide range of topics and really exercises the different AppKit and Foundation technologies. It uses most of the same examples as the authors’ previous book NeXTSTEP Programming StepOne: Object-Oriented Applications, but they have done a great job of updating for OS X (not a small task) and reorganizing the progression much more logically. Some prior revisions still peek through though (like figure 4.2 on page 112). Of course you can’t cover everything in the Cocoa technologies (It omits detail on the networking and distributed objects topics). But more limiting in my view is that it’s doesn’t mention much about object oriented techniques (was there any mention of mvc?). Though they use good design (like breaking out the evaluator part of their mathpaper app) there isn’t much clue that this would have been a great design had there not been a functional reason to do so. But paired with the Hillegas book (or heck, even Currency Converter), this book is a tremendous help in learning Cocoa.

*JoeWalsh: In addition to the points made by WmMoss, I’d like to point out that, although the content is good, the editing is bad. My advice is to wait for a bug-fixed version to be printed.

*Marvin: I don’t see the editing weakness. It has been necessary to reread things a few times because I skipped over some detail in my hurry to get to the good stuff.

*Pretty good book. I’d have to say it’s a great complement to the Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X book.

*Great book, but look out for a few editing errors here and there. But if you go to O’Reilly’s web site they’ll have fixes for everything there. Use the book, AND the web site.

*Good book, and it makes a great pair with Aaron’s book. This book covers multithreaded apps and running multiple processes, which Aaron’s doesn’t–and his covers some topics that this doesn’t. Not as strong a book on its own, but makes a great supplement.

*This book strikes me as a rehash of an old NeXTstep/OpenStep book that’s been searched and replaced with Cocoa. There are some parts that don’t seem to take advantage of new stuff added to Cocoa since the olden days.

*DennisMunsie: I thought that this was a pretty good book, but it could’ve concentrated more on the Cocoa programming and less on the system overview portions. But, as a starting point to programming on MacOS X, it does a great job.

*From a newbie point of view, I found this book to have one or two good introductory chapters, but it was very frustrating to use. I kind of quit reading about 80% through, after I got comfortable with a few concepts and the online documentation. If the book had been about 1200 pages, there might have been enough depth and explanation, but trying to pack all of these concepts into that amount of space made it difficult to learn. One thing at a time. And then, there are quite a few errors that got me stuck and frustrated for long stretches. The O’Reilly site has an errata page that cleared up a lot of that difficulty, but it still needs a 10.2 update. That trip to the O’Reilly site led me to a great resource: http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/ct/37 Mike Beam’s series of articles on Cocoa took much smaller steps and packaged the concepts better for me. And they’re free.

*While you will outgrow this book very quickly, it is a decent introduction to the development environment, tools, objective-c and cocoa.

I used this book to learn how to make Cocoa classes work together. I read BookLearningCocoaObjCSecond before this one, but Building kinda cemented the introductory concepts for me. It works much better, of course, if you recast the examples with code of your own. And I was truly grateful for the material on multithreading and NSTask - man, dat is some powerful sht

*As someone who has read and used all of the books reviewed here, I can add one thing that I especially appreciated about this book. It shows you how to set up a number of interface elements programmatically. Now, I’m sure we’re all happy that InterfaceBuilder takes care of all that … except when we need to do something that relies on the complexity that IB hides. After reading this book, I have a better idea about some of the gory details of window management, etc.