Title:** Cocoa Recipes for Mac OS X **Author: Bill Cheeseman Publisher:** Peachpit Press **Release Date: November 12th, 2002. List Price:** $44.99 **ISBN: 0201878011
*Description: Hands-on, step-by-step approach to learning Cocoa, the development environment for creating Mac OS X applications. Mac OS X is the future of Apple. Any new programmer coming to Mac OS X will want to learn Cocoa, the most sophisticated environment for creating Mac OS X-native applications. Very approachable, hands-on guide to learning Cocoa. Shows readers how to avoid common pitfalls and mistakes. Author is known among the Mac OS X programming community for his Cocoa tutorials at Stepwise. Cocoa Cookbook for Mac OS X takes a practical, no-nonsense, hands-on, step-by-step approach, walking you through the details of building a Cocoa application from start to finish. It explains in detail what the code is doing and why it works, Cocoa Cookbook places a decided emphasis on getting an application to work correctly as quickly as possible. This is a collection of simple, do-it-yourself recipes to guide you through the process of creating classes and subclasses, objects, outlets, and actions.
Bill Cheeseman is a freelance Macintosh software developer working mostly in AppleScript, the Apple help system, and Cocoa frameworks in Mac OS X. He also writes a Cocoa tutorial column for StepWise, a NeXT and Mac OS X developer site.
Amazon Link:** http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201878011/102-0288245-6828168 **Barnes & Noble Link: http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0201878011
*Official web site: http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/VermontRecipes/
—-Comments—-
*I’d have to say that Cocoa Recipes for Mac OS X is a great guide for anyone interested in writing applications for MAC OS X. It is chocked full of USEFUL real-life programming examples. Each chapter successively builds upon the last to churn out and refine a true to the bone Mac OS X application. Nearly everything you’d like to learn how to accomplish with the Cocoa Framework is here. Lots of code examples show you how to implement tabbed views, menus, drawers and a whole slew of other user-controls. One outstanding feature this book provides (and should be standard in every programming book) is a Table of Topics. This table immediately follows the table of contents and provides an alphabetical list of controls, objects, and major classes from the Cocoa Framework and where in the book to find examples on coding these items. This feature is great. If you’ve ever thumbed through a programming book in frustration looking for an example on how to program some obscure function that you recall reading once… –you’ll understand just how useful a Table of Topics is!
*One really surprising omission is there’s nothing that talks about AppleScripting the application (at least as far as I’ve read, and checking the table of contents / table of topics / index). Knowing how big Cheeseman is on AppleScript, I figured there’d be something there. It doesn’t look like any of the otherbooks talk about it either.
*This is a terrific book. Extremely well-written, and full of useful tidbits you don’t get anywhere else. While many books skip over details to simplify the presentation, this book doesn’t. As a result the explanations are a little longer at times, but you find out everything you need to do to write a truly polished application.
Never ever can I agree on the last quote - extremely well-written. I was REALLY disappointed about this book. It said on the back that it was for the newcomers to Cocoa, It’s not! I got lost about p. 150, because I could not get the app to compile, and I didn’t understand what the heck he was talking about. And the whole book, about 750 pages is about one single project. Hm - wonder what happens if you don’t get the first part working… You can’t go on! Maybe it’s a great book if you know some Cocoa, but I didn’t get a thing out of this book. The first tutorial was 150 pages… why the heck do you do that? I knew C when I started this book, now it’s in my trash because I REALLY dislike the book. *Sorry
*Uh, if you run into problems, you can download the code from the book’s website. Personally, I find I learn a lot more if I make a mistake, and then have to track it down. Knowing why it doesn’t work is as important as knowing why it works.
*I would suggest this to be your SECOND Cocoa book, because it gets into a lot of detail of how to make a production-ready application. The first section (~150 pages) has you create a full application, with open/save file, revert, undo/redo functionality. The thing is this application has ONE checkbox. I would suggest that someone starts with a book that gets into the more fun part of cocoa in the beginning, rather then the boring parts of development. But, I WOULD suggest everyone look at this book before publishing anything that they write, because of the exact same reason.
That is excellent advice. Having been around the block a few times, the information in this book was very welcome. Once you have an idea of how the toolkit works, this book helps assemble the pieces into a more coherent whole. After working through the first (pretty big) chapter, the end result is kind of dissapointing to look at, but the underpinnings that were developed were pretty exciting. ++MarkDalrymple
This book contains a prodigious, nay, obsessive amount of detail, applying a soon-to-be bygone technology (which is rapidly being supplanted by Bindings and the Controller layer.) The app that you build contains almost all common kinds of UI controls, but if you want to restrict yourself to a particular and small subset, you have a lot of hunting to do in the text. Worth the effort if you can see from it how to situate your own model and controller classes in its scheme of things. Carefully read the first recipe, 150 pages or so, and then skip around to find the stuff you need. I ‘got’ the Cocoa architecture much better after that exercise. A lot of work, but worth it, IMO.
This book is very in depth and I’m sure it could have been useful at one time, but currently it is very dated and the author hasn’t bothered to provide any updates that inform the newbie about the changes from Project Builder to XCode. It’s very frustrating to try and work around the many differences between the way Project Builder and the way XCode edits project information.