Big Nerd Ranch has released “Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming,” a book by Mark Dalrymple and Aaron Hillegass that was previously only available only as a student guide for the US$3,500 Big Nerd Ranch class of the same name.
Big Nerd Ranch teaches programmers in an environment that includes room and board; Dalrymple and Hillegass are Big Nerd instructors. Their new 541-page book shows programmers the underpinnings of Mac OS X and how applications can take advantage of the tools and APIs (application programming interfaces) that make up Darwin and the Core Technologies.
Topics covered include: advanced C; GCC; libraries and frameworks; memory; GDB; exceptions and signals; the file system; NSFileManager; sockets; CFRunLoop; using multiple processes; NSTask; the Keychain; authorization and authentication; distributed objects; Rendezvous; open directory; multithreading with Pthreads and NSThread; using distributed objects to coordinate threads; CVS; and performance tuning. The table of contents can be perused online.
“Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming” costs US$97.95 and can be ordered on the Web. Developers who are attending next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference can purchase the book at the conference (at Dev Depot) for $92.95.