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Programming in Objective-C (Developer's Library) | 
 enlarge | Author: Stephen Kochan
Publisher: Sams
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $23.50
You Save: $16.49 (41%)
New (26) Used (11) from $22.50
Rating:  47 reviews
Sales Rank: 2826
Media: Paperback
Pages: 576
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 7.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 0672325861
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.133
UPC: 752063325865
EAN: 9780672325861
Publication Date: December 18, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Programming in Objective-C is a concise, carefully written tutorial on the basics of Objective-C and object-oriented programming. The book makes no assumption about prior experience with object-oriented programming languages or with the C language (upon which Objective-C is based). And because of this, both novice and experienced programmers alike can use this book to quickly and effectively learn the fundamentals of Objective-C. Readers can also learn the concepts of object-oriented programming without having to first learn all of the intricacies of the underlying procedural language (C). This approach, combined with many small program examples and exercises at the end of each chapter, makes it ideally suited for either classroom use or self-study. Growth is expected in this language. At the January 2003 MacWorld, it was announced that there are 5 million Mac OS X users and each of their boxes ships with Objective-C built in.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 42 more reviews...
 If only there were more programming books like this one... July 28, 2004
Kayembi (London, UK)
185 out of 186 found this review helpful
This book is the most lucid book on programming I have ever read. Having a little (self-taught) experience in C, this book was recommended to me as a good foundation before trying to learn Cocoa for programming on Max OS X. I fully expected to be confronted with the sort of doorstopper that I would never finish, as has been the case with several C++ books; instead, I found a straightforward, uncluttered guide, written by somebody with a genuine talent for teaching.
The author takes the approach of not trying to teach you C first, and this has two advantages: first, if you have no C experience, you get started immediately learning Objective-C, so you don't get taught one thing only to be told to forget it later; second, if you do have some C experience, you are thrown into object-oriented programming right from the start. The explanations are consistently concise but clear, and I found myself getting through a chapter or two every night after work and feeling that I was learning something significant on every page. I read someone describe it elsewhere as "Teach Yourself Objective-C in 21 Days," except that this book really could live up to such a title. I wholeheartedly agree - it took me only three weeks to work through the whole book, including nearly all of the exercises. If, like me, you have seen terms such as "polymorphism", "inheritance", "instance method" and "subclassing" bandied around only to stare at them in mute incomprehension, this book is a revelation. The author introduces all such major concepts very gently - in fact they seem to creep up on you, so that by the time you are presented with the proper terminology you either already know what it means or find yourself exclaiming - as I did - "Oh, so that's all polymorphism is!"
My only gripe - and it is very minor - is that the explanations of bitwise operators and bitfields are near incomprehensible to anybody who doesn't have a programming background (or rather, they are explained well, but there is no indication of when you would ever use them), and the author does occasionally (though rarely) seem to assume that the reader has a solid maths background (when there are those of us out there from humanities and arts backgrounds who want to learn to program, too). These topics take up little more than several paragraphs of the 500 or so pages, though, so if you're a novice, don't let them daunt you as they are the exception rather than the rule.
One thing I appreciated about this book was that full code is provided for 99% of the examples - you are never left with an example that won't compile because the author assumed you could guess the rest yourself. Moreover, whilst the examples and exercises do develop on code from previous chapters - in particular, you will develop a Calculator, Fraction, and Rectangle class in the first part of the book, and AddressCard and AddressBook classes in the second part - the author wisely avoids the build-one-big-program approach that some books adopt. This keeps things fresh and lively - you have to type in different examples, meaning you become familiar with the language through repetition, but at the same time you are doing different things in the examples themselves. Moreover the exercises at the end of each chapter are well judged - you are forced to think and look back through the book to recap on what you have learned, and they are difficult without being too difficult. (Don't skip them!)
In the second part of the book, the author moves on to the Foundation framework, which forms half of Cocoa (Cocoa also uses the AppKit for creating GUI's). You will learn how to use NSString, NSArray, NSDictionary (and their mutable counterparts) and a lot more. It builds on everything you've learned in Part One and provides a bridge between the basics of Objective-C and moving on to Cocoa. I expect that this part of the book especially will become dog-eared very quickly. To sum up, this book took me from knowing nothing about Ojbective-C to feeling as though I could write all the background code for the app I have in mind (ie. everything except the GUI). I am now just hoping that Hillegass's book on Cocoa is half as good.
A word of advice: I urge anybody who buys this book to print off the errata on the author's website (the address is given in the book), as there are a few minor errors that might stump you if you don't. Also, if you use Xcode instead of the command-line tools, you will need to delete the contents of the automatically-generated ..._Prefix.pch file as well as the #import line at the top of main.m each time you start a project (the book only specifies the latter). The prefix file caused me some headaches in one of the later chapters.
A lot of people on various forums say that this is the only book from which to learn Objective-C, and I can see why. In short, if you are reading this review you are probably thinking about learning Objective-C, either for its own sake or as groundwork for moving on to Cocoa. Which means that if you are reading this review, you should buy this book.
Great Book November 7, 2004
Manuel A. Ricart (Cottage Grove, MN United States)
18 out of 21 found this review helpful
Stephen Kochan books are always clear and concise and deliver all the material you need to know in a straight forward way. While I have been programming in ObjectiveC for since 1990, I bought this book to add to my library. To my surprise I realized that I also own a very worn 1988's copy of Programming in C.
One interesting twist on this book, is that it doesn't presume that you know how to program in C so it covers the C underpinnings of the language.
I enjoy this book November 5, 2007
S. C. LU (Miramar, FL USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I am a professional Java developer and working with object oriented design every day. Originally I thought let me just pick up a Cocoa book and start the coding quickly. I then realize that Objective-C is a very different object oriented language. This book does not assume any background of C language, and explain things in real detail from the real Objective-C point of view. After reading this book, I found that Objective-C was an elegant addition on top of the original C programming language. It achieve all object-oriented features without over complicate the original language. If you want to learn Objective-C, this is definitely the book to start from. Since Objective-C is supported by GCC compiler, this book also tells you what is Mac OS X specific, and what is supported by all platform.
Adding to the dogpile - this is where to start if you want to learn ObjC or Cocoa September 22, 2005
Steven G. Harms (Austin, Tejas, USA)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
Here was my post to the cocoa-dev mailing list (slightly updated as it's a year old):
FROM : Steven Harms
DATE : Thu Jul 29 01:03:34 2004
...[W]e are both in the early stages of learning Cocoa and would like to apply our experiences in other languages to make learning Cocoa easy.
Part of the heuristic of 'how to learn' starts with an editor, a
compiler, and "here is how you declare a variable" - we then move toconditionals, loops, objects etc. Without that education I felt very naked in the O'Reilly books.
I read the first 15 chapters or so of Stephen Kochan's _Programming in Objective-C_ by SAMS press. I am now going through Hillegass' book and am very pleased (outside of the mail i sent moments ago!).
Kochan's book gives enough familiarity in the basics to demystify a lot of the Cocoa work -- Hillegass does a very good job in building up the basics. I would recommend this path to the absolute beginner.
Steven
....
I stand by this post in a very serious way. I really love ObjC just for itself. I'm thinking about teaching my girlfriend how to program, and I'm definitely thinking about using Objective C because it is regular, sensible, modular, OO, and a lot of fun.
It's amazing just how cool ObjC is. It's really quite too bad that most of the Cocoa books (which is why you're really looking at this book, isn't it?) just kinda slap things around loosley with respect to nailing down the essentials of the Objective C language.
I guess they figure they've got to get us to Interface Builder quickly or else our TV-eroded sense of instant gratification kicks in and turns their book into a doorstop (if that's the case, do you /really/ have any business being a programmer?)
In any case, the only ORA press book that does anything considerable with the ObjC foundation is Davidson's book but then the example is fairly trivial (a CD database) and some of the fundamental primitives of the programming language are not even broached.
This foundation is where Kochan excels. Contrary to other reviewers I love that he teaches from a text editor + compiler approach. I think that the Xtools that apple provides makes writing Cocoa a bit *too* easy. As a result I don't really understand what I'm doing. Much like a child who has learned a series of signs and expressions and can utter them, the mental clay has not been marked with the meaning of those symbols.
If you want to learn Cocoa, I still say put away XTools and ORA press (as good as they are at most other things). Start with Kochan, (vim|emacs), and gcc and get your basics down. From there you'll have an excellent foundation and won't be confused / irritated / baffled by "unexplained magic" that appears in other cocoa books.
A soild introduction to Obj-C December 26, 2006
Stephen Siciliano (Traverse City, Michigan)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
This book was a very good introduction to the Objective-C programming language. Before I bought this book I did have some programming experience in PHP and Perl, but I did not feel like such experience was needed in reading the book. More importantly, it did not matter that I had no previous C or C++ experience. It is important to note that this book does not really cover making applications for Mac OS X in depth. In addition to purchasing this book I also purchased "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" by Aaron Hillegass, which did a much better job of covering the specific aspects of making Cocoa applications.
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