New LoC is here

It’s finally seen the light of day. Learn Objective-C on the Mac is currently in dead-trees form, and available at amazon and other fine retailers.

I’m rather proud of the work that Scott Knaster and I have done on this second edition. It is the contents of the first edition from Spiderworks, but with about 100 new pages of goodies, including NSPredicate and Key Value Coding. There’s also a whole new chapter on Xcode tips and tricks.

The book is designed to sit between Dave Mark’s updated Learn C on the Mac and Dave’s and Jeff Lamarche’s most-excellent Beginning iPhone Development (exploding exploring the iPhone SDK). We go into things figuring you’ve met C and programming, so no “for loops are fun! ooh! variables!” kinds of rehashing. Instead we cover what’s been added by Objective-C, as well as some software engineering topics like indirection, object-oriented programming, the Open/Closed principle, and refactoring.

Plus the book is written to be fun. The English language is one of my favorite playthings. But the humor isn’t over the top and in your face. (at least I hope so)

On the AMOSXP front, we’ve added about 100 new pages of material, such as Objective-C 2.0 goodies (including some perversions of NSFastEnumeration), 64-bit programming, FSEvents, Dtrace and instruments, and NSOperation; and have also been removing some of the old and obsolete classic Mac information since it’s not relevant.

Fourteen students at the Big Nerd Ranch‘s Advanced Mac OS X Bootcamp got a first crack at the new material. There is a second bootcamp scheduled for February in Frankfurt. The actual publishing of the next edition (and its ultimate contents) will hinge on Snow Leopard’s schedule. Hopefully MacWorld will give us some schedule insight there.

LoC Review

James Summers has posted a very thoughtful review of Learn Objective-C on the Mac.

Making Command-Line Tools

Just in case you’re reading Learn Objective-C on the Macintosh, and you’re wanting to make a “Foundation Command-Line Utility” project in the might (or might not) be new Xcode which might (or might not) be associated with the latest iPhone excitement, you’ll probably want to look under “Command Line Utility” on the sidebar, and choose “Foundation Tool” from the project picker. They may (or may not) have moved it from previous Xcode versions. Or not. You didn’t hear it from me,

Learn Objective-C… on the iPhone?

I usually don’t like to Pimp my own Warez, but Sir Daniel Punkass pointed out to me that Learn Objective-C on the Macintosh is quite applicable to iPhone development, especially for folks who don’t already know Objective-C. Sometimes I’m a bit clueless.

LoC is an introductory book, but assumes you know C (it’s officially the follow-on to Learn C On the Macintosh). It covers a lot of the basic stuff you need in Cloud-Cocoa Land – especially memory management, which we go over a lot in the latter half of the book, since memory management is the place that many Cocoa programmers have problems.

We tried to make it as non-boring as possible, so I think even experienced programmers can get something out of it. From a twitter in response to Mr. Punkass, Diego wrote “started on the book and it’s very good. straight to the point and doesn’t linger on topics. which i like. thanks for the tip” (Thanks Diego!)

On the down-side, it doesn’t cover the properties syntax, or the new fast enumeration syntax, but once you have the basics of the language under your belt, you should be able to pick those up quickly.