Learning Carbon is designed to get you programming right away in Carbon™, one of two APIs (Application Programmer Interfaces) Macintosh® programmers can use to write applications that run native in Mac® OS X. Using Carbon, you don't have to rewrite your Mac OS programs entirely to get them to take advantage of the new features in Mac OS X. Instead, all you have to rewrite is the 10 to 20 percent of the code that can't be translated to OS X. For C programmers, Apple's Carbon is the essential building block for applications on Mac OS X. With Carbon, you can use simple, traditional C interfaces to create world-class applications for a world-class operating system. After orienting you with a detailed tour of a Carbon application, Learning Carbon walks you through the entire process of designing and creating a complete Carbon application called Moon Travel Planner. Along the way, you'll be introduced to two pivotal development tools: Project Builder and Interface Builder. You'll learn key concepts about Carbon and Mac OS X programming, including event management, resource handling, and bundle anatomy. And you'll get direct, hands-on instruction on how to implement essential application tasks, such as managing windows, printing documents, opening and saving files, creating and responding to menu commands, providing user help, and organizing your application for easy localization in multiple countries and languages. After finishing this book, you'll be ready to start writing your own Carbon applications. Written by Apple insiders with access to engineers deeply involved in creating Mac OS X, Learning Carbon brings you information that's not available anywhere else, to get you in on the ground floor of the exciting new Mac OS X application development market.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 6 Ratings

Well written but simply too short and too simplistic - 2002-02-13
Reviewer Rating:
If your a beginner who wants to learn just enough about Carbon to get by this might be the right book for you, so long as you use it along with Apples excellent Inside Mac OS X documentation and Project Builder. However if you are looking for a more detailed book which covers pretty much everything you need to know but were afraid to ask I would recommend Carbon Programming by Kevin Bricknell which is about 10 times longer. Learning Carbon is not a bad book, it will give you a good grasp of the "feel" of Carbon and is an excellent guide to Apples Developer Tools but it is neither an extensive tutorial nor a particularly good reference.

Back to basics, A gentle introduction - 2003-02-06
Reviewer Rating:
Learning Carbon is a gentle introduction to the very basics of Carbon programming. It carries the reader over the foothills of Carbon development to give them a solid grounding in the fundamental concepts of the API. This book will also be of some value to application developers who are already familiar with the classic Mac OS programming APIs but who need to know about the nuances and special flavors that the Carbon application framework adds to the Mac OS.

As other reviewers have pointed out, this document covers many of the same areas as Apple's on-line developer documentation, but the value of the text is that it collects that documentation into one place and ties it together into a cohesive tutorial. The text is also able to go into a little more depth on some topics than the on-line documentation.

If you're looking for a comprehensive reference text, this book is not going to help you, but if you need to know about the fundamentals of developing applications with the Carbon framework then this book can teach them to you.

Great Start on MacOS X Programming! - 2001-06-23
Reviewer Rating:
This is the perfect book to get if you want to get started programming the Mac (OS X or OS 9). The Mac has two API's, Cocoa and Carbon. There is absolutely no difference in your application's performance when it comes to these two API's because they are based on the same internal code for OS X (Darwin). If you want to learn Cocoa, don't waste your money on the "Learning Cocoa" book, just go to Apple's online documentation and do the tutorials (they're the same as the book!).

I hope there is better on the way... - 2001-12-04
Reviewer Rating:
This book disappointed me - I read the online docs that became "Learning Cocoa", and liked them quite a bit, so I expected a similar book in "Learning Carbon". I was wrong.

I bought both as hard copies because the Cocoa one was such a great little reference, but this book contains a number of errors in the samples, doesn't cover a lot of very relevant details, and doesn't give you a good "feel" for the Carbon API. I learned more reading through the headers for a few hours than I did from reading this book.

Not quite shovelware, but hardly worth the price - 2001-06-24
Reviewer Rating:
Want to learn to write an application that runs in Mac OS X or Mac OS 9? You could buy this book... or you could look on your hard drive.

As shovelware goes, I've seen far worse -- Sun apparently thinks Java developers will pay $... or more for books that reprint freely-available API javadocs -- but "Learning Carbon" can't shake the fact that at least half of its contents are already installed as a part of the Mac OS X development tools.

Specifically, chapters 2-8 and 12 are substantially a rewrite of the PDF file "Moon Travel Tutorial: Creating a Carbon Application" that is installed with the Mac OS X dev tools (in the directory /Developer/Documentation/Carbon/pdf).

The rewrite is helpful, as it seems more aimed at non-Mac developers, taking time to explain concepts that are carried over from earlier versions of Mac OS. And the other chapters do address topics not directly handled by the "Moon Travel" PDF, such as property lists, printing, and file I/O.

Unfortunately, the book feels as much a tutorial on writing Carbon code with one specific tool, Apple's free "Project Builder", than on Carbon itself. I don't know that this book provides enough info for a developer to write Carbon apps with CodeWarrior, the most popular Mac development tool.

Hopefully, future Apple/O'Reilly books will feature more original content and at a greater level of detail. The Carbon API's are huge, and merit both tutorial-style and reference-style books.

It's understandable that "Learning Carbon" could have been rushed out as shovelware to give developers something to work with as soon as possible following the release of Mac OS X, but from companies with such good reputations as Apple and O'Reilly, it's surely a disappointment.

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