O’Reilly & Associates, the company behind books, conferences, and Web sites related to the technology industry, has released “Building Cocoa Applications,” a US$44.95, step-by-step guide that shows developers how to build sophisticated graphics applications for Mac OS X using the Cocoa development environment.
“Building Cocoa Applications” is a hands-on tutorial that teaches through example. There are simple and self-contained examples of individual Cocoa features and extended examples of complete applications that programmers can put to immediate use in their own environments.
“Cocoa embodies the principles of object-oriented programming from its user interface down to its very core,” said Simson Garfinkel, co-author of the book. “While it greatly simplifies the task of building applications for Mac OS X, the Cocoa environment is also different from the environments to which most programmers are accustomed. As a result, the learning curve can be pretty steep if you don’t have competent instruction.”
In “Building Cocoa Applications,” the authors lay out the basics of an application in one chapter and then layer additional functionality onto that application in subsequent chapters. The book includes extensive source code, available for download from the O’Reilly Web site, along with an appendix listing additional resources.
“Since its release in 2001, Mac OS X has generated tremendous momentum as a development platform,” said Michael K. Mahoney, the co-author of the book. “The combination of its Unix-based foundation plus the Cocoa, Objective-C, and Java programming environments makes Mac OS X the best and most comprehensive development platform available, by far.”
You can check out a chapter from the book, ” Building a Project: A Four-Function Calculator, ” online. For more info, including the table of contents, index, author bios, samples and ordering info, see the book’s Web site.