Mac OS X Advanced Development Techniques introduces intermediate to advanced developers to a wide range of topics they will not find so extensively detailed anywhere else.

The book concentrates on teaching Cocoa development first, and then takes that knowledge and teaches in-depth, advanced Mac OS X development through detailed examples. Topics covered include: writing applications in Cocoa, supporting plug-in architectures, using shell scripts as startup items, understanding property lists, writing screen savers, implementing preference panes and storing global user preferences, custom color pickers, components, core and non-core services, foundations, frameworks, bundles, tools, applications and more. Source code in Objective-C, Perl, Java, shell script, and other languages are included as appropriate.

These solutions are necessary when developing Mac OS X software, but many times are overlooked due to their complexities and lack of documentation and examples. The project-oriented approach of Mac OS X Advanced Development Techniques lends itself perfectly to those developers who need to learn a specific aspect of this new OS. Stand-alone examples allow them to strike a specific topic with surgical precision. Each chapter will be filled with snippets of deep, technical information that is difficult or impossible to find anywhere else.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 7 Ratings

Unique breadth, not a lot of depth - 2003-07-05
Reviewer Rating:
This book covers a pretty random set of topics from basic introductions to Mac OS X and Cocoa to things like CFPlugins and NSStatusItems. The introductory stuff is not useful to advanced programmers and the other topics, for the most part, are of insufficient depth to be useful to most advanced programmers. In many cases, you can learn just as much from Apple sample code, and more from the Apple documentation. It seems like the author just identified a bunch of topics not covered by other Mac OS X programming books (which is good), but then just had very basic information about them.

Scott Knaster would be proud - 2003-08-14
Reviewer Rating:
Reading the chapters was a breeze. They evoked the ghostly image of of Scott Knaster tickling away at the Apple keyboard, dispensing his wit to lost newbie programmers.

That said, as a lite book it does succeed as a breezy tour through the country side. I'm suprised SAMS titled this book, the way they have done.

Conclusion: Supplemental reading only.

Gee, I kinda liked it - 2003-07-10
Reviewer Rating:
I liked this book. It might not be "advanced" in terms of "you'll skip 7 years of industry experience by reading this book", but it does cover some things that the standard documentation doesn't. I liked the plug-ins stuff, covering it both from the Cocoa and Carbon points of view, so you can decide which way works best for your app. It's easy to read, and I especially like having all the code samples at the end for review.

Waste of money - 2003-06-28
Reviewer Rating:
The author might be a respectful developer for MacOS 7, but he obviously have just discovered development with MacOS X (and in particular Cocoa). There is not a single bit of anything "advanced" in this book, and the author obviously have no idea about Object Oriented techniques, neither he understands the design behind Cocoa. And there are definitely better intro texts about PHP. Does the author know that Apple runs WebObjects on MacOS X - set of frameworks lightyears ahead of PHP?
In summery, this is #1 worst book about MacOSX development, and a very wrong one to be sure!

Great content - worked for me! - 2003-08-12
Reviewer Rating:
I bought this book because I wanted to learn some of the things it covered under OSX, specifically about system services and preference panes. The other chapters were a bonus. I think that each chapter covers its topic very well and essentially provides source code with a full walk-thru and detailed explanation. If you like this type of approach, you will enjoy this book. I guess it depends how advanced you already are and whether you like the content selection. It was perfect for me. I'm also starting to learn XML-RPC and SOAP specifically because of the book. A great buy!

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