Comments on: A preliminary review of three Cocoa and Objective-C related books

By: Rounak Jain

Rounak Jain — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 08:57:41 +0000

I agree with these comments mentioned earlier:

1. By Paul:

I bought the original Hillegass book and found it utterly useless and frustrating. It was an endless step by step recipe for creating an example program, with no explanation or motivation whatever for most of the steps, followed by “Now write another program using what you learned.” I hadn’t learned anything:……

2. By Marshall
Programming in Objective C 2.0 is God damned near IMPOSSIBLE to understand in the begging!
Although, on the SURFACE the language of the book seems ok, the content is so information-dense, you’ll need a mental magnifying glass to even begin to understand what’s going on. It’s really quite scary. you’ll still have to eventually program in PENCIL AND PAPER and copy down everything you read, by “rote”, a million times, before you even BEGIN to understand the stuff from pages 30 onward!

By: Marshall Sidman

Marshall Sidman — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:57:18 +0000

Nonsense! Programming in Objective C 2.0 is God damned near IMPOSSIBLE to understand in the begging! It’s treatment of “classes, instances and methods” is a convoluted jumble, that jumps right in, without outlining the actual FLOW of data from the @interface, @implementation, and program sections! It BLEW ME OUT OF THE WATER and I’m having caniptions and shit fits because now, I feel too stupid to even attempt to learn Objective C! I thought I’d move on to Iphone programming. Hah! What a joke! I doubt that I’m going to even finish the book, because I was slammed against the wall with classes so rapidly I thought my head’s gonna explode! Beginners, stay away from this book! Although, on the SURFACE the language of the book seems ok, the content is so information-dense, you’ll need a mental magnifying glass to even begin to understand what’s going on. It’s really quite scary. you’ll still have to eventually program in PENCIL AND PAPER and copy down everything you read, by “rote”, a million times, before you even BEGIN to understand the stuff from pages 30 onward! Be warned. But I’m not going to give up my quest in trying to learn the language. I found it totally overwhelming and completely caught me off guard, rapidly. It’s just a terrible book, at least in the beginning, for beginners. And I thought I was half way intelligent too. and was going to launch a “career in iphone programing”. Hah! I Deluded myself. I’m depressed, sad, and frustrated.

By: Mark Dalrymple

Mark Dalrymple — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 03:06:28 +0000

Thank you very much for the kind comments! I’m glad you’ve been able to get value out of AMOSXP.

Since you’ve got programming chops already, you might want to snag the O’Reilly Objective-C pocket reference. It’s mercifully short (compared to things like C++/Java in a nutshell), and covers all of the interesting parts of the language without extraneous fluff.

Cheers,
++md

By: Robert

Robert — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 21:52:18 +0000

I would have to disagree with Paul. He mentions that Hillegass’ book just shows a bunch of examples with no instructions. I thought the examples had very clear instructions and being able to apply what id learned to similar projects wasn’t that big of a leap. But hey, we all learn differently.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 21:30:03 +0000

If you’re an experienced programmer, Kochan’s book may too elementary at the beginning. Skim the parts that seem simple. If you are new to Cocoa, where this book will pay dividends, even to experienced programmers, is in part II where he writes about Foundation classes. A good grasp of the Foundation classes prior firing-up Interface Builder and XCode will make your life a lot easier.

By: Antonio Cangiano

Antonio Cangiano — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 18:47:53 +0000

That’s interesting Paul, thanks for your comment. Could you mention the books that you have found to be useful while learning Mac OS X development?

Thanks,
Antonio

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 18:32:59 +0000

There must be many different types of people using books. I bought the original Hillegass book and found it utterly useless and frustrating. It was an endless step by step recipe for creating an example program, with no explanation or motivation whatever for most of the steps, followed by “Now write another program using what you learned.” I hadn’t learned anything: the program logic was easy, but figuring out how to create it with (then) Project Builder was maddening.

My basic test of a Cocoa book is a coherent explanation of why Interface Builder works the way it does: the Nextstep/Cocoa notion of “outlets” and “messages” and how IB works with them is the most confusingly counterintuitive concept I’ve encountered in 32 years of programming, and most books scarcely mention it.