Rixstep
 About | ACP | Buy | Industry Watch | Learning Curve | News | Products | Search | Substack
Home » Products » Reviews » The Good

Cocoa Programming

Anguish, Buck, Yacktman
Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆


In what will probably remain one of the rare products to ever get the highest possible Rixstep review rating, authors Anguish, Buck, and Yacktman take the reader on a tour-de-force journey through the world of Cocoa. Three hundred pages into the book they're still explaining how the system works (by way of comparison Simson & Garfinkel waste your time with 140 pages about how to click on push buttons) and how you as a developer should regard it. Programming discipline and proper training mean a lot here.

Apple have 'inside' books available through Vervante but they're famously unhelpful. Cocoa Programming takes the reader through the forest and shows where the trees are. And it covers everything - from advanced views to creating one's own frameworks to different techniques for multithreading and so on and so on through well over 1,000 grueling (but immensely satisfying) pages.

Publisher SAMS don't seem to want to reprint this gem so getting a cheaper copy can be difficult but there's no substitution: none of the other books on the market - especially including Simson/Garfinkel and 'Nerd Ranch' books - come anywhere near giving you what you need.

And the book hasn't been updated for the latest releases of OS X but that doesn't matter: no other book will come close to giving you the basics to the system anyway. This has always been the only one and it still is the only one.

Read this very carefully: if you're a professional Cocoa programmer or a professional programmer planning to take a look at Cocoa there is only one book you will ever need and this is it.

Get Cocoa Programming at Amazon

About | ACP | Buy | Industry Watch | Learning Curve | News | Products | Search | Substack
Copyright © Rixstep. All rights reserved.