I wrote up a long, detailed breakdown of the failures of this book on my blog at [....], but here's the short version.
The book needs a few things to be successful, especially in light of the new crop of Cocoa developers coming around thanks to the iPhone. Most start with the definitiveCocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition) by Aaron Hillegass and move on to learn about specific framework technologies. As such, certain stylistic and programming conventions that have come to represent "Cocoa programming best-practices" are not adhered to at all. Sample projects are lazy in scope, despite the author's stated intention to "spark our imagination." Sample code is often full of ivars and methods that aren't even used in the project. No memory management seems to be used at all. Code fluctuates between using "traditional" bracket notation and dot notation from project to project. And I could go on...

The author's writing is incredibly redundant, and the book could use an editor who isn't afraid to slash and burn. There are long passages that say nothing, and certain concepts and statements that come up again and again. Where on the one hand the author wants us to feel free to make "gaudy" things to learn how to integrate Core Animation into the future of interface design, he spends the better part of the book warning us against doing exactly that. He seems truly terrified that he's unlocking Pandora's Box upon the development community and will be personally held responsible if things start going wrong in Cocoa projects from now, forward. I humbly suggest this isn't the author's role in my life as a developer.

Perhaps my biggest beef with the book is that its target audience is ill-defined. It is definitely not an introduction to Cocoa, but it also tries too hard to hold the hand of more experienced developers. So its too easy for those with Cocoa experience, but too hard for those without experience.

I would really love to see this book re-imagined as a logical next-step from the Hillegass book and dig in deeply to Core Animation. Develop three or four deep, original projects, explain the code development in detail, build on the best-practices Hillegass teaches, and cater exclusively to a development community that understands Objective-C and how to use the Cocoa frameworks without fear.

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