Step Into Xcode

reviewed by Robert Pritchett

Author: Fritz Anderson Addison-Wesley Booksite: http://www.awprofessional.com/title/0321334221 Released: January 30, 2006. Pages: 496 $45 USD, $61 CND, £32 GBP,   40€ EUR with CD. ISBN: 0321334221 Requirements: Mac OS X. A desire to code Mac OS X apps and paying with Universal Binaries. Strengths: The CD. Weaknesses: None found. No Errata page on the website.

Step Into Xcode by Fritz Anderson digs into Xcode with emphasis on coding. What makes this book stand out for me is the treatment on Fat or Universal Binaries. The other thing is Fritz Anderson isn’t shy about saying that the bugs he has in the code are there on purpose so as to help us walk through not just coding but also in troubleshooting and nipping them in the bud.

There are not a million Mac-only developers put there, so this book will have a very limited audience.  However, I found the book to be well-written and from my knothole, didn’t see any mistakes. I couldn’t tell if any of the printed code was misprinted.

Each of the 25 chapters ends with a short summary and helps make the book a “quick read” to get you to where you really need to be to get quickly up to speed using Xcode.

The book is essentially a “lessons learned” book based on years of experience by the author. Part I is all about the Mac OS X application life cycle with the obligatory intro to Xcode, doing simple workflow and passive and active debugging, compiling,  and starting cocoa apps, views and controllers, examining property lists, libraries and dependent targets file packages and bundles, creating custom views, dynamic libraries and frameworks, using v\Version Control and even getting into cross-development, data modeling tools, Spotlight and things to avoid when developing code.

Part II is all about doing tasks in Xcode and begins by walking us through a project seeing groups and file lists, class browsers and modelers and then does a couple of conversion chapters for CodeWarriors and Make veterans before getting into debugging techniques for printing, custom formatting, breakpoint commands and conditions,
“lazy” symbol loading and “zombies” in cocoa and core programming. Next, is a chapter dealing with optimizing Xcode for speed, than a chapter ensues on AppleScripting in AppleScript Studio before moving on to showing how to project-manage a large project. The book finishes with traps and tips and has two Appendices on installing Xcode and using build variables and source trees.

The major plus is the included CD that helps us go through the chapter examples and “fix” errors.

If you want to learn to code using Apple’s own development platform, this well-written book by a master coder would be a great place to start.