[dws]

The first major book on programming in the Cocoa environment is out. It is a rewrite of the 1997 book: Discovering Openstep: A Developer Tutorial - Rhapsody Developer Release. The original can be found in PDF form on Apple's site, but I highly recommend buying a copy of the book.

I was afraid that the book would be little more than a pretty version of an old document, but it turns out to be very nicely fleshed out; using all the correct Cocoa class calls for the current API. There are also important additions that the original document does not contain.

If you've already done all the original tutorials, then this book is too basic for you. But if you are a beginner, or (like me) got bogged down with the Openstep PDF (I never could get Travel Advisor to work!), then this book is for you.

The tutorials are extremely clear; with lots of pretty pictures! If you follow the directions explicitly then your programs will work (I've already gotten further into Travel Advisor than I had before, and I've only had the book for a couple of days!).

All the basics of Cocoa programming are covered. By the time you finish the tutorials (which is all the book really consists of), you will have a firm foundation upon which to build (puns intended!) your budding programming career.

One downside... I was hoping that the book would come with a CD filled with all the ProjectBuilder project files in the tutorials, but it doesn't (a little cheap of O'Reilly, considering they're asking us to pay $35 for a rewrite of a 1997 document!). It would have been nice to compare our own messed-up versions with 'perfect' ones, so that we could see where we went wrong!!!

Comments / questions / etc. from others who are working through the O'Reilly tutorials.....

[Camali]

where did you get the book from?

[m2bored]

www.bookpool.com has it for $20.95...


M2

[dws]

I bought the book directly from O'Reilly :: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learncocoa/
I figured that they should get the extra chunk of money because they've been pretty good to the Mac 'cause' - & - they are publishing excerpts from their Learning Cocoa book online (complete with a forum where people can ask questions and get answers directly from the O'Reilly people). I think that good works should be rewarded.

I checked the bookpool site. They're still listing it as not in stock, but it'll certainly be selling at a good price when they do have it! Also, I remember reading that Amazon.com will be carrying the book (at list price, I believe).

A note from WWDC... Everyone was given coupons which could be redeemed for a free copy of either the Carbon or Cocoa books. They quickly ran out of Learning Cocoa!

[Deemz]

I called O'Reilly Customer Service on Friday to ask when my pre-ordered copy of Leaning Cocoa would ship and they told me it was shipping that day. I was told to expect it to arrive at the end next week so hopefully I will have it by Friday.

[mr_sonicblue]

From what I can tell, this book is too basic for most programmers (ones that have already programmed in another object-oriented language). They need a "Programming Cocoa" or "Practical Cocoa Programming" book. (If you've read another "Programming ________" or "Practical _______ Programming" book, you know what I mean.)

Maybe I'm wrong. I haven't actually read it yet.

------------------

[dws]

mr_soniccube...

If a person is experienced at object-oriented programming, if a person can look at the Apple Foundation and AppKit documentation and not get lost, if a person can look at the source code for TextEdit and not say 'huh?!?'... Then this book is not for them! And I HAVE read the book!!

It will be a wonderful day when someone publishes the kind of books that you (and all of us) desire. But that hasn't happened yet. In fact, I have yet to hear of one even in the planning stages. It could be more than a year before this occurs. Until then, books like O'Reilly's Learning Cocoa will have to suffice. Even an experienced programmer would find some benefit from such a book.

I completed the Travel Advisor tutorial yesterday. Works beautifully! YeeHaa!!! I don't know why I was having such problems understanding NSDictionary before I tried this tutorial. It seems so simple now!

Oh well, on to plumb the depths of multi-document programming.....

[Angus_D]

I've had a working TravelAdvisor for months now

It took me aaages to figure out why one of the fields wasn't working right... I'd accidentally wired up an outlet the wrong way round. DOH!

[macrophyllum]

Can't find the book now. I called O'Reilly and they are out of stock until late June! Anyone know who has it?

[CodeWarrior]

First printing is sold out. You will have to wait for the 2nd printing. Sounds like a hit. I'll get mine in MWNY unless bookpool.com has them sooner. Their prices rock!

[swcrissman]

O'Reilly has sold out of the copies that they have, but they've still sold many copies to other resellers, which are still available.

I just ordered my copy from Fatbrain which lists it as in-stock, shipping in 1-2 days. So they are still out there.

Spencer

[shawn_hsiao]

I am reading mine from http://safari2.oreilly.com/tablhom.asp?home

[dws]

Safari is an impressive online service. For as little as $9.95 a month subscription, you can read up to 5 of the books on their list. And it's an impressive list!

If OS X were a mature development environment, with a dozen excellent books on the market, then I would certainly consider subscribing to their service. If a person's interests include computer programming and/or web development on a number of platforms, then this service could easily be for them.

For myself, my needs are too simple to make the money worth it - and you don't have the satisfaction of being able to carry a book around with you! It is true that a year from now I will have no use for the Learning Cocoa book, but I feel that the convenience was worth the purchase price.

[shifter]

dws said:
"Discovering Openstep: A Developer Tutorial - Rhapsody Developer Release. The original can be found in PDF form on Apple's site"

In case anyone was looking for that PDF, after a long search I finally found it:
ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Technical_Publications/Mac_OS_X/Legacy/Rhapsody_DiscOS.pdf
It's about 3.5mb and 233 pages long. It includes the CurrencyCoverter tutorial to show a simple application, The Travel Advisor to show forms-based applications and the To Do Project for multi-document programming.

If dws is correct, and Learning Cocoa is just a prettier version of this PDF, O'Reilly might want to consider releasing a more in depth how-to book.
Including how to properly implement drag-and-drop between interface elements. Since several people here have failed to find anything on how to do that in existing documentation, myself included.

[xspriter]

you can get it through Amazon.com too:

Learning Cocoa

i prefer to go through them most of the time

[dws]

Cocoa Dev Central has a review of "Learning Cocoa" on their site. A good read, unless you've already bought the book - then it will be depressing!:
REVIEW

Basically, they say to give the book a pass.

As I've gotten further into the book, I guess that my original enthusiasm has been a little diminished. While it is true that some of the typos contained in the original NextStep document have been corrected, new ones have been introduced. Also, the organization of the book leaves a little to be desired. Vital coding is left as an exercise for the student, but without the necessary background for a newbie to actually accomplish said code - unless they already know Cocoa, which defeats the purpose of the book! And the damn books start falling apart after a couple days, mine included!!

This book is not worth the list price of $35; though I would still recommend it at $20 (mostly because it is the only Cocoa book on the market).

[SmileyDude]

dws --

what do you mean the book falls apart after a few days of using it??? Unless O'Reilly has done something different with this book, all of their books use RepKover as their binding. And, owning about 10 or so O'Reilly books (including Learning Carbon, and a copy of Unix in a Nutshells that's about 5 years old), the binding is pretty good. I've never had a problem with them... even the ones I use heavily like the Nutshell books (Unix, Java, J2EE... ).

Now, the book itself may not be as good from a content point-of-view, I can't confirm or deny that, since every bookstore between my work and home has sold out (anyone know of a bookstore around Woburn MA that has one in stock????), but the book shouldn't be falling apart.

[dogzilla]

Welp, I've spent about a week with the book, and I can post some observations:

(My background: I'm pretty familiar with programming concepts, but not with C. However, what I've read about OOP and the few abortive attempts I've made at learing OOP languages gave me a basis to build on for learning Obj-C. I'm still getting things straight in my head, but it's coming together, and I'm learning C and Obj-C in parallel.)

The book isn't up to O'Reilly's normal standards. I find this book to suffer from several probs, most notably an annoying tendency to reference terms/concepts before they've been defined (protocols is a good example). Also, as was mentioned elsewhere, the book assumes far too much familiarity with Obj-C: the section introducing Obj-C could definitely do with some fleshing out.

While the code presented in the book works quite well, the book doesn't give you a solid grounding to experiment with the code much. As an example - the section on mutable arrays and mutable dictionaries mentions a few other methods for these classes and gives one-line examples, but leaves out the huge number of other potential methods, and doesn't refer the newbie to checking the NSArray and NSDict classes for even more usable methods.

Overall, I think the book relies too much on the on-disk documentation, which (at the current stage) isn't useful enough to stand alone. While the dev help center is a great idea, it would be much more useful if you could search within a document (did I miss this somewhere?). And there's really no substitute for a printed language/framework reference (or is Cocoa still in flux?)

Overall - I think this book is better than nothing, but I'm looking forward to some other book that really cristallizes Cocoa for me.

[eevyl]

Originally posted by dogzilla:
<STRONG>The book isn't up to O'Reilly's normal standards. I find this book to suffer from several probs, most notably an annoying tendency to reference terms/concepts before they've been defined (protocols is a good example). Also, as was mentioned elsewhere, the book assumes far too much familiarity with Obj-C: the section introducing Obj-C could definitely do with some fleshing out.
</STRONG>

Well I think that Objetive-C, protocols and many others Cocoa concepts are explained for free in the "Object-Oriented Programming and the Objetive-C Language" that comes with every Mac OS X copy. Before "Learning Cocoa" I started reading that book, and when I finished it I had a overview vision of ObjC, but no vision on Cocoa programming. I think that "Learning Cocoa" is the next step.

Also I think that is better to try to learn ObjC after learning ANSI C. My recommendation to newbies would be:

1. Learn ANSI C
2. Learn ObjC
3. Learn Cocoa

[DaGuy]

I got my copy last week from Fat Brain. So, far I find it really decent and adequate it is right at my level -I know Java and little bit of C but not an expert by any measure.

Here my observations:


1. It provides some key examples -I was looking all over the web for stuff like that.
2. The organization is unsual but it does get you going fairly quickly, I really hate
those books that demand you go through many chapters of theory before you print "hello world".
3. The illustrations are thoughtful and do help a great deal.

On the negative side, I found that some of the code is incomplete. The answer to this is to download the code from the O'Reilly web site and compare as to see why theirs work and yours doen't. This is a bit tedious (and somewhat unexcusable) but one tends to learn much from that kind of drill. I am one with this book

[dogzilla]

Originally posted by eevyl:
<STRONG>

Well I think that Objetive-C, protocols and many others Cocoa concepts are explained for free in the "Object-Oriented Programming and the Objetive-C Language" that comes with every Mac OS X copy. </STRONG>

Yes, I see what you mean. But still - there's an advantage to having a printed book as opposed to a PDF. That's why I bought this book after all - most of this book is also available for free on the web and on your hard drive. Since they already had the information in PDF form, why didn't they include it in the book? 200-odd pages wouldn't have added very much to the cost of the book (paper's cheap, and so is 1-color printing on a web press). It would have made this a *much* stronger book.

Also, what I wish for is an Obj-C Reference along the lines of O'Reilly's Javascript and DHTML references. I'm not certain that the Obj-C Language Reference in the PDF is at that level.

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by dogzilla:
<STRONG>

Yes, I see what you mean. But still - there's an advantage to having a printed book as opposed to a PDF. That's why I bought this book after all - most of this book is also available for free on the web and on your hard drive. Since they already had the information in PDF form, why didn't they include it in the book? 200-odd pages wouldn't have added very much to the cost of the book (paper's cheap, and so is 1-color printing on a web press). It would have made this a *much* stronger book.

Also, what I wish for is an Obj-C Reference along the lines of O'Reilly's Javascript and DHTML references. I'm not certain that the Obj-C Language Reference in the PDF is at that level.</STRONG>

You do realise that you can order a printed copy of the Obj-C lang guide from the ADC area on FatBrain, don't you?

[dogzilla]

Originally posted by Angus_D:
<STRONG>

You do realise that you can order a printed copy of the Obj-C lang guide from the ADC area on FatBrain, don't you? </STRONG>

No I didn't. I think I'll head over and do that.

Of course, this doesn't change the quality of the O'Reilly "Learning Cocoa" book. Maybe they could include a coupon for printing it from Fatbrain?