This is the third and final post in a series reviewing the book Cocoa Programming, by Aaron Hillegass. Here are links to the first and second parts of this review.

In this post I’ll review a few highlights of the book as well as offer a few suggestions (from my perspective) for improvement should another edition be forthcoming. Let’s begin with the highlights.
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This post is the second in a series reviewing the book Cocoa Programming, by Aaron Hillegass. This part of the review is dedicated to a closer look at the code examples.

Starting from Chapter 2, the book dives into building relevant code examples. Working with Xcode and Interface Builder, you’ll quickly become familiar with the interface and interaction among both tools. There is even a short segue into the basics of debugging in Chapter 3.
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This post is the first in a series reviewing the book Cocoa Programming, by Aaron Hillegass.

Let me begin by saying, Aaron’s know the topic of Cocoa programming. As a previous employee of NeXT which merged with Apple, Aaron has extensive experience teaching developers, including many Apple Engineers, how to write applications for Mac OS X.
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This tip is based on information in the book Xcode 3 Unleashed. I just completed a three part review the book, which you can read here.

When inside a debugger and stepping through code, line be line, have you ever wanted to move to the top of a loop and restart, including resetting counters, without having to restart the application/debugger? Here’s a cool trick you can use within Xcode to do just that. In the figure below, notice that the current value of the variable name is America/Antigua.
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The Minnesota CocoaHeads met tonight and it was an interesting spin on development for the Mac. Troy Gaul did a presentation on Adobe Lightroom, from the perspective of the development tools and approach used to create Lightroom.

Although I have heard of Lua , I had no idea of the depth of its usefulness. It was impressive to see the extent it’s used in Lightroom, somewhere in the neighborhood of 60% of the code base. Continue reading...

This post is the third in a series on the book Xcode 3 Unleashed, by Fritz Anderson. I’ll wrap up the review in this post by covering both highlights of the book and suggestions for future editions.

Highlights
Let’s begin with the highlights of this book, and there are many. You’ll notice from the moment you crack open the book, it’s filled with color. Not just color figures, all code examples are in color, as in, color syntax highlighting. And the colors match what you’ll find in Xcode, how cool is that?
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This post is a continuation of Part I of the book review of Xcode 3 Unleashed, by Fritz Anderson.

Unlike the first section of the book, in the second half all topics are self-contained, that is, they are not tied into one example. This section begins with an in-depth look at working with Xcode projects. You’ll learn about code specific features such as code completion to folding/hiding blocks of code; class related activities such as a class browser and class modeler (visual representation of hierarchies); and optional layouts of content within Xcode, including the default, all-in-one and condensed. Continue reading...