Advanced Mac OSX Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (Big Nerd Ranch Guides) [Paperback]

When I heard there was going to be a revised edition of this book I immediately preordered it. This was well over a year ago, so when it finally came out I was at first disappointed to see many references to out-of-date material. For example the book discusses GCC which has been phased out by Apple in favor of LLVM. Garbage collection it touted as a big new feature, but it has not caught on at all. Finally, the product description says the material is based on MacOS 10.5 and 10.6 (we are at 10.7 currently if you are counting).

Also, it is extremely annoying to be charged a premium for the kindle edition over the printed copy. I guess this isn't the author's fault, but still, not cool Amazon.

Ok, now the good stuff, and the reasons I gave this book 4 stars. This book has a huge amount of really useful information, and it is presented in a form that makes looking stuff up quite easy. My favorite material presented in this book is the coverage of macros, dynamic libraries (the dyld family of functions), memory management, CFRunLoops, and the section on debugging. Although the product description seems to date the book (mentioned above), this is actually not that important. Almost all of the discussion of GCC can be applied to LLVM. While there are many books that cover UNIX programming, there are very few that focus specifically on MacOS. Similarly there are a lot of books that cover high-level Cocoa programming, but few that dig into lower level details. This book does a great job presenting these UNIX'y, lower details from the perspective of a Mac developer.

For the next edition of this book, a couple of things I would like to see:

- Less coverage of the most basic UNIX stuff (i.e basic file IO, socket programming). That stuff has been beaten to death and is the same as it was 30 years ago.
- Dedicate a few pages to Mach ports. This is a fundamental Mac technology yet there is so little information on it.
- Discuss XPC / Sandboxing

In conclusion, I would highly recommend this book to fellow Mac developers looking to take the next step from The Big Nerd Ranch's seminal book on Cocoa programming. Don't let the out-of-date references put you off, there is a wealth of information here that is completely applicable and relevant.

I confess to not having finished the entire book (it's huge), but I can already say this book is a keeper from just having read the first 3rd. There is an entire chapter dedicated to the nitty-gritty of blocks which was fantastic. There are many books which give blocks very superficial treatment (usually a page or two at most); this one gives blocks the attention they deserve (especially as they become the mandatory means of accessing certain functionality in the Cocoa API's). Really the only negatives are the lack of some of the newest content (Clang, ARC, etc.), but apparently the author plans to release updates in the future (from reading his response to Darren Minifie's review) so this is less of a concern. You certainly won't feel cheated as the quality content to cost ratio may be the highest of all OSX/iOS books out there. This is a huge book filled with meat (no fluff here), that manages to make you laugh in a delightfully geeky way (some of Dalrymple's variable names cracked me up for example) and deliver solid content with a voice that is informative, entertaining and much more human than a man page or an Apple doc. This isn't one of those obnoxiously written books where attempts at humor diminish it to the point of being borderline childish such as some of the "Head First" or "for dummies" books. The treatment of the subject matter is quite mature but still very approachable. He also has some valuable insights into gotcha's, issues to consider and edge cases that are easy to overlook--which can be worth their weight in gold if you never have to spend days/hours debugging something you knew to avoid.

The biggest editorial criticism I have is that there are code snippets that aren't part of a compilable program, which would have been better as small little programs in main.m. I have found manually keying in examples to be a critical component of self-teaching programming, and when there aren't complete examples to pull from, this becomes impossible. It can be trivial to create your own, but it's much nicer to have self-contained examples that clearly illustrate one particular concept and eliminate the possibility that your example is introducing a flaw or conceptual misunderstanding into it. Kochan is an author who uses this style to great effect. Much of the code in the book is thankfully part of complete programs, but I mention this for consideration in future editions.

"Advanced Mac OS X Programming" is a must buy for anyone who wants to take their coding beyond the first tier of superficial apps.

My approach to learning Xcode, Objective-C, Cocoa, etc. is to get as many books as possible and expect to learn just a few important things from each one. This book covers a number of topics that you won't find much about elsewhere. Its definitely not a beginners book but if you are reasonably knowledgeable about the topic it might add something to your knowledge.