Product Description: There are several other books on programming for Mac OS X, but none of them comtain explanations of how to leverage the powerful underlying technologies. This book goes down to the real nitty-gritty of multi-threading, interprocess communication, networking, performance tuning, distributed objects, queues, Bonjour, authentication, the keychain, and directory services. The tools are also covered: gcc, gdb, subversion, Shark, and Saturn.
Odd format... great content... scary title When I first received this book, I was intimidated by the advanced topics in the table of contents and also the format of the book. It looked painfully dry and highly complicated, but as I started reading the book, I realized it is very reader-friendly. This books very well describes the unix tools for version control, testing, and development. There is a very useful chapter on subversion which gives enough introduction to get things rolling. It also provides topics on os X technologies that you won't find in other books such as Bonjour, Multi-Processing, and Keychain management. I think it is an essential complement to any Cocoa development book.
Advanced topics are described with a very easy language and I was able to read almost half of the book in a few days, and trust me, I'm a slow reader. I recommend this book to all Mac OS X programmers and Cocoa Aficionados.
A great resource Don't expect to learn to code from this book, but once you know how this book will help you solve any problems that you run across. I don't think that I'll ever read it cover-to-cover, but I know that it will always be in my library.
Nice Book If you are a Programmer not in College, this is a nice book. As I read it, I learned several new things but then when I took Operating Systems Programming, I realized that we went over everything in the book, more in depth, and then some. If you aren't a Computer Science Major and you want to really program on the Mac, buy this book. However, if you are going to College, save your money. Let your professor teach it to you.
Awesome book for anyone looking to learn low-level This book fills in most gaps you might encounter while learning about the low-level BSD/Mach aspect of Mac OS X and Darwin. Mach and BSD iokit is described in detail, and there are tons of useful code examples all over the book. This book even explains ipc and pipes very well, and isn't the size of the bible, like other books. It gets to the point as soon as you get past the TOC.
Read This Book If you're a Mac OS X developer and want to get serious about it, this book is mandatory. It is always on my desk right by the computer, and really is that perfect reference. Nothing really compares to this book, the previous Aaron Hillegass book is rather basic but is more of an introduction. I have a BS degree in CS and even though a lot of this has been covered, the rest of it is done in graduate school. So if you're looking for that little bit extra, give it a shot.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
