- ISBN13: 9780321552631
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Apple’s new Xcode 3 is the most powerful Mac development suite ever created. In Xcode 3 Unleashed, renowned Mac developer Fritz Anderson has written the definitive guide to making the most of Xcode 3 to build any Macintosh or iPhone application.  Anderson leads you through a simple project that covers the entire Xcode 3. x development lifecycle. You’ll walk through building and debugging command-line tools, creating Mac OS X user interfaces, modeling data, localizing languages, compiling applications, and much more. Along the way, he introduces each of Apple’s remarkable development tools from the latest version of Interface Builder to Instruments—a powerful new tool for analyzing and optimizing your code.  Anderson shows how to manage your source code in any environment, whether you’re working solo or participating in a worldwide team. He thoroughly illuminates Xcode 3’s build system and shows how to make the most of Apple’s perform. . . More >>
As another reviewer so kindly mentioned, this book is not for those new to programming, objective-c, or object oriented development. It is Perfect for those of us with a strong background in development that are looking for a walkthrough of the Xcode development environment.
This book makes an excellent followup to Cocoa- Programming for Mac- OS X, Third edition This text moves well beyond cocoa development theory into giving readers a very visual (tons of color screenshots and diagrams) tour of the XCode environment by walking them step-by-step through building a project that implements most of the features that beginning cocoa developers will want to know about when trying to break into the OSX Development world.
One of the biggest plusses about this book has to be the attention given to the Debugger, Unit Testing, Memory Mangement, Instruments and other performance tools. It’s information I didn’t know how to find before reading this text, and it has given me a greater knowledge about how to better tune my apps and what to pay more attention to while coding.
Overall I would highly recommend picking up Xcode 3 Unleashed to anybody who is seriously considering making an entry into the world of Apple software development. There are too few books on Apple dev, and the fact is that a majority of them are outdated and useless as of Xcode 3 except for theory. This book is a fresh look at Apples latest development environment and I would encourage you to pick it up and get started–it’s a great read.
For those of you interested in picking up Xcode skills for iPhone development, this is really a great getting started point for learning the IDE, getting your hands dirty with proper MVC, and learning how to debug and tune your apps. It is definitely worth the read and perhaps a bit more in line with your goals of learning the apple development environment than the Hillegass book. (I wish I had started here first)
And thanks go to Fritz, by the way, for taking the time to create such an in depth tutorial to what is becoming a teriffic development environment from Apple.
Rating: 5 / 5
I was given this book by being a member of the Des Moines Cocoaheads group, and as a new developer on the Mac, I was very grateful for it. While other books provide a better introduction to Cocoa and Objective-C, Xcode 3 Unleashed fills a gap by providing detailed explanations of the Xcode IDE itself.
I was able to immediately make use of Chapter 8, Version Control, in my project. That chapter alone is almost worth the cost of the book. It steps you through creating a local repository, adding your project to the repository, committing changes, comparing files, and rolling back changes. After using the built in subversion support in Xcode, relying on Time Machine for version control seems archaic.
Fritz Anderson also spends a good deal of time introducing Xcode to developers more familiar with UNIX and Linux development. Chapter 21 is dedicated to “make Veterans”, and explains how Xcode builds a project under the hood. This book also includes separate chapters for using the included debugging and optimization tools like Shark and Instruments.
The last thing I’d like to say about the book is that it is beautifully laid out. Full color illustrations and syntax highlighting that matches the default Xcode editor really make the book stand out. I do not think Xcode 3 Unleashed should be the first book you read getting started in Cocoa development, but it is certainly towards the top of the list. I would recommend learning C first, then Objective-C, and then moving into the IDE. You are much more likely to appreciate all that Xcode does for you after that.
Rating: 4 / 5
This is a great book. It is not a pure Cocoa Development book, although it does cover some aspects of Cocoa Development. This goes into all the critical pieces of XCode, i. e. the IDE, Debugger, Source Control, Instrumentation, etc.
Very well illustrated with great layou. I’ve been a developer for almost 20 years. Have lots of development books. This ranks up there with the best. Makes a perfect companion to Aaron Hillegrass’s “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X” 3RD EDITION. If you’re new to Mac OS X Cocoa and iPhone development, the learning curve is steep, but these two books will get you on your way. Have Fun!
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is definitely not for those new to Mac development. I’m a C++/C# dev from the MS side of the spectrum who decided to try and get some experience with Mac development. This book was a very poor choice for my introduction.
Having come from the MS world, I’m used to a certain quality in terms of how concepts are laid out and examples are structured in a book. In this book, I found the examples needlessly complicated and poorly explained. Instead of neatly organizing lists of tasks for a project, and separating out explaination of more abstract concepts relative to the language and environment, everything is mixed together in no particular order. It reminded me of listening to a colleague at work who has ADD explain something. Any given paragraph might have a task (usually 1 of many), mixed in with a partial explanation of a concept, mixed in with information about the environment or OSX, mixed in with the authors personal feelings on the matter. It was painful to try and navigate through. I felt as though it wasn’t properly proofread by the publisher before being released.
There’s no doubt that the author knows XCode and Mac programming inside and out, but his ability to articulate his experience and skill into something that can be consumed by others leaves something to be desired.
It likely would have been easier if I were a veteran Mac dev using this as a way to brush up on the latest and greatest, but for someone new to the platform, this is a horrible choice.
Rating: 2 / 5
I have previously developed software for windows using Visual Basic and Delphi and C. Now that I am a Mac convert I tried to learn software development using Xcode. This book says Beginner-to-Experienced. First the book chooses exceedingly complicated code for it’s introduction that could be totally avoided and still teach the points intended. Second it makes the excuse that some of the techniques “look like magic if you aren’t experienced in the underlying technology”. Well YA! I am not experienced in this technology, that’s why I bought the book!
Very poor for learning Xcode unless you have already been writing on the Mac (which means you probably already know Xcode!)
Rating: 2 / 5