Core Mac OS X And Unix Programming
Aaron Hillegass and Mark Dalrymple have written what looks to be a more advanced book on Cocoa and Darwin, however the table of contents leaves me wondering. It spends 52 pages reviewing C, but only two pages on Rendezvous and five total on ObjectAlloc, Sampler, QuartzDebug, and CHUD (that’s Computer Hardware Understanding Development not the classic 1984 movie, although Hillegass’s other book does explain OO delegation in terms of Knight Rider). In any case, it seems to break some new ground for Cocoa books. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it covers AppleScript.
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Oh, the other thing I meant to say is that I've always loved Hillegass's Knight Rider analogy. I use it on people all the time, to their great amusement.
Don't laugh, but I think I knew the Shep, one of the writers of CHUD :) If it is in fact the same guy, he runs (or at least ran) a small art gallery/club in Gloucester, MA called Art Space.
I wasted many weekends their in high school helping out with my friends' band...
Oh yeah, the book looks cool too :)
Here's a review from Michael McCracken.
And a review from Bill Bumgarner.
Here is a Slashdot post with Michael's review and comments.
Just an elaboration on the 52 pages of the C review. That's there for the folks coming to the unix/cocoa world from languages like Java, Perl and PHP, where things like structures, pointers, and bitfields might not be in their day-to-day vocabulary. (these issues cause confusion with students who have taken the Cocoa class, which is why we decided to add them) When teaching the Core class, we don't actually go over those chapters (they get sent to the students beforehand), but we figured we'd include them in the book to help out those without a lot of prior C experience.
I'm telling you: the world has *waaay* too many books about Cocoa/OS X theory at this point. What we need now is books about *practice*. As I've said before: we really need the Cocoa equivalent of O'Reilly's Perl and Java Cookbooks. I'd snap that up in a second!