Cocoa and Objective-C Cookbook by Jeff Hawkins
Summary:recipes for Mac OS Developers
Cocoa and Objective C Cookbook is a typical cookbook for programmers. It contains 78 recipes related to various aspects of Mac OS X development. You will find here snippets of code that target User Interface, events handling (gestures), file management, web content analysis, database related topics as well as topics related to application architecture and Objective-C language itself.
In general, book is well organized. Each chapter is divided into few sections: Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There is more and See also. Each section discuses different aspects of the issue. In fact, section names are fully self explaining. There are few topics that will surely make your life easier, like Singleton pattern related recipe, sections devoted to HTTP request, or ones that are devoted to database based development. These provide you with fast start by providing readers with ready to use snippets. If I can value the topics covered within the book, I definitely can’t understand the requirements. Book is based on XCode 2.4 when version 4 is available on the market for longer than half of the year. This makes some parts of the book completely in comprehensive in terms of the topics covered as well as the IDE itself. You are no longer required to use external XIB editor, there are completely different icons within XCode, some options are located in different places. This is really a drawback. Another issue is the way chapters are organized. At some point it looks like author jumps from topic to topic without any specific schema. For example, chapters devoted to Objective-C and Application’s Architecture are located in the middle of the book. It looks little bit strange to me.
Would I recommend this book? It depends. There are few topics that are hard to find in other Cocoa related books. It has well prepared examples that you can download directly from the Packt’s page. If you are looking for most recent book on the market, devoted to most recent XCode – this book is not for you. If you don’t pay that much attention to details, you will probably find few recipes that will make your life easier.
Product page:
Packt: http://www.packtpub.com/cocoa-and-objective-c-cookbook/book
Amazon (in Books): Cocoa and Objective-C Cookbook
Amazon (Kindle): Cocoa and Objective-C Cookbook
