Jesse Feiler
1 0 stars
Disappointed. This book is worthless. The author should not try to write a book while smoking dope. The first half of the book is a Mac-is-great commercial. The last half of the book is a Mac-is-great commercial. Yes, I know the Mac-is-great, I love the Mac, Macs are cool, Macs are usefull, rah rah rah. Unfortunately, the book is content free. No actual developers were involved in the production of this book; no actual developers were informed by reading this book.
2 this weak book betrays it's title
As a C developer of Mac & Win software, I bought this book hoping it would be of some help for porting an existing MacOS application (written in C) to Carbon/Mach-O.
This book is worthless for C/C++ developers.
This book is biased toward new projects written in Objective-C & the Cocoa framework. It ignores C, pushing the objective-c language instead.
The first 100 pages deal with topics as worthless as "what is a programmer" and "the history of the mac os" ... Who cares? Teach me about the Event Manager and Quickdraw vs. Quartz. Did you know that this book makes NO mention of Quartz and only has one page number listed for "Darwin" (pg 141).
I've already returned it and I'm now looking for something else.
3 More a philosophy guide for OS X development
OK, so three stars could be seen as generous, but this book is not all bad, as some reviewers suggest. Firstly, this book contains some history of the subject area. When I brought this book I was looking for something that would help me understand the pros and cons of the different approaches to programming for OS X in C/C++, JAVA or COCOA. If you are new to COCOA & OS X programming, then this book certainly helps. The book then attempts to give you comparative programming advice for C++ and COCOA - but I've read better programming texts. In terms of useful information content, this book does not justify it thickness. What this book is not is a comprehensive guide to programming for OS X. However it did answer the "C++ or COCOA" question that I had.
4 overview only but not of great use
somewhat disappointed, specially with a that catchy title: *developer's guide*. Going from the coding material only, it would be extremely difficult for a newbie to start coding an app for the Mac OS X. The 1993 book by Simson Garfinkel and Michael Mahoney, "NeXTSTEP programming: step one, object-oriented applications", is much more diligent in providing detailed guidance on just how to construct an app and use the tools for software development. There were also some confusing remarks when comparing the three programming languages, Java, Objective-C, and C++. And omissions too: for example, no mention that a protocol in Objective-C is like an interface in Java. I didn't see a mention of the fact that there is garbage collection in java and there isn't in Objective-C (but I could be mistaken). In my humble opinion, I would place Java and C++ closer together for their types, while Objective-C is closer to Smalltalk for being typeless. A typed Objective-C, in which the identifiers are not of type id but of a class type such as NSString, or NSData, requires the compiler to do alot more work, just as in the case of C++ and Java (and the author does illustrate the disadvantages of these languages with the example of the Fragile Base Class), so there isn't much advantage in using the runtime features of the Objective-C runtime engine. The author chose, in his examples, the typed form of Objective-C. Most of the book is really a description of the product features of the toolkit to use when doing software development, but not to a detailed degree that one could do without printed manuals. This is no substitute to the manuals. No mention was made of connecting to data sources, internet development, distributed applications. The first 50 pages are about why objects are great in storyline form. But is was pleasant to read. In the old days of nextstep programming, there was a beautifull little book that was called Nextstep programming tutorial by Ann something. In that booklet, examples on how to build an application without the Interface Builder were given. Just code in a text editor, write the make file, and then compile. Only in later chapters did the author in that book detailed how the exact same application could be developed using the fancy tools. With this approach, the developer gets a real feel for the development process itself, which are evenutally hidden by the tools. That is the book that I was looking for when I saw the title of this book.
5 Useless
This book was one of the first on the market for OS X programming. I believe that's the only reason anyone would buy it. The explanations are uninformative - basically saying the obvious and referring the reader to the Apple documentation. (You'd be better off just directly reading the free Apple documentation available online)
For an example of what to expect from this book take the following stunning revelation (page 307) - a discussion on Help Viewer - "Users click on buttons; they move scroll bars; they have been trained to interact with the interface." I'm glad we cleared that up. These platitudes continue throughout.
Examples are given in both Java and Objective C - this adds nothing since the Java classes are just wrappers around the Objective C classes. All these examples show is how to do the same thing twice in a slightly different syntax.
Do yourself a favor and buy "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" by Aaron Hillegass.
6 A Differing Opinion
Obviously, every author has a particular audience in mind; and this book is clearly targeted towards the beginner. Consequently, you should ignore *all* of the previous and discouraging reviews on this page, as they were written by serious Mac OS X Developers who were looking for the documentation that Apple hasn't written yet, and appear to be annoyed that Jesse Feiler hasn't taken on that Herculean task!
Mr. Feiler has provided a good book for the beginner. If you are looking for a "one-stop-shopping" that consolidates a lot of information scattered throughout various web sites across the internet, and provides plentiful examples in both Java and Objective-C, then you could do far worse than this book. If you read through it faithfully, then you will inevitably outgrow it at some point, and then *will* need to supplement it with information from Apple's Cocoa Development site.
Just to clarify, I am not related to or indeed even know Mr. Feiler exept through his writing, and have no relationship whatsoever with Morgan Kaufmann. Rather, I am just a satisfied reader.
7 Good starter book
This book provides a good start for OS X programming, it helps explain the why behind what's going on. It's not the total solution, and not for those already used to OpenStep/Cocoa programming, but it's a good resource for people getting started.
8 A 580 page overview, A Developers Introduction
I may be the wrong person to write a review on this book. As an OS X developer, much of the info in this book can be found in Apple's website, in Apple's (free) technical documentation, and at WWDC.
A "Developer's Introduction" is a better title for this book.
If your brand spanking fresh to OS X (where have you been?), buy the book!
Otherwise, consider "Carbon Programming"..that book doesn't mess around.
9 I can't see a target audience
Lots of paper, but not much information. Many things are scrated on the surface, but not in a way you can really use something. As an experienced developer on other plattforms (Java,--ix) I wanted an overview of the OS and the API's. The book failed here totally. I think I got 2 usefull snippets of information from the first 300 pages, when I decided its a waste of time, to go on. And additionally some Java-examples are close to wrong (the reflection example).
10 Waste of good trees
It is a large book, which might entice some to buy the tome on the theory that there must be _something_ of value in so many pages. Such a theory would be dead wrong in my opinion. What little of real value that might be gleaned is so overwhelmed by useless blithering that finding the nuggets, if indeed there are any, would be way too time consuming to justify the effort. I used the sparse index to search out possible answers for a host of issues that are still bugging me, and found zip in the way of enlightenment. Indeed, if the word superficial did not already exist it would have to be coined to describe this mish-mash. A pox on the author, the publisher, and anyone else involved in this miserable misadventure.
This waste of trees is nothing more that a con to pry money from the hands of folks frustrated by Apple's hit-or-miss documentation and seemingly total indifference to beginners like me, although Apple (and O'reilly) can now take comfort in knowing that their marginal at best effort, "Learning Cocoa," is no longer the bottom of a very shallow and muddy barrel.
