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.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
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... more info
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.
