Sunday, July 7, 2002

Over the past year, I acted as tech editor on 3.333 books (all amazon links below). I edited 1/3 (or so) of the chapters in Professional WebObjects with Java. It was published by Wrox press and contains writing from many, many authors -- typically one per chapter -- and, as such, the book lacks the cohesion of a book written by a single author or small team of authors. After that, Aaron Hillegas invited me to edit Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. The end result is an awesome book; very approachable and extremely thorough. From what I understand, Aaron teaches a heck of a Cocoa programming class, as well. Near the end of editing Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, Sams invited me to edit the book WebObjects Developer's Guide by Ravi Mendis (who also created the SVG Objects framework. Another excellent book -- I learned a number of things about developing webobjects while editing the book. It was refreshing to read [edit, actually] a book from a developer that had let go of all Objective-C baggage. As such, the book covers the integration of a number of cool third party technologies (such as SVG and PDF) while also focusing on modern application server development paradigms. Good book! While I was finishing the Sams book, Simson Garfinkel invited me to edit the updated version of Garfinkel and Mahoney's Nextstep Programming book. The new version is called Building Cocoa Applications: A Step by Step Guide. Just like the first book, the new version takes developers from building a primitive command line application through to building full featured Cocoa applications that integrate command line tools into their otherwise OS X compliant UI. Editing books takes a lot of time! I bet writing a book takes more -- I'm just crazy enough to try and find out. A few folks asked me which Cocoa book to buy. I would honestly recommend both (no, I don't receive any kind of a royalties from either). The Hillegas book provides an excellent survey of the various widgets found throughout Cocoa and how to put it all together into full features applications that leverage the Cocoa APIs to their fullest. The Garfinkel/Mahoney book does a wonderful job of demonstrating how the developer can take full advantage of the awesomely powerful legacy implied by the Unix and NeXTSTEP underpinnings of OS X. Together, the books thoroughly cover all things Cocoa. With all that said, there is a third Cocoa oriented book entitled Cocoa Developer's Handbook. I have long known Scott Anguish, Erik Buck, and Donald Yacktman and fully suspect that their book is awesome. I look forward to having a look through it someday. 12:29:29 AM