Product Description

Considered a classic by an entire generation of Mac programmers, this popular guide has been completely updated for Mac OS X. Don’t know anything about programming? No problem! Acclaimed author Dave Mark starts out with the basics and takes you through a complete course in programming C using Apple’s free Xcode tools. This book is perfect for beginners learning to program. It includes all–new Mac OS X examples! Provides best practices for programming newbiesWritten by the expert on C–programming for the MacPresents all the basics with a pragmatic, Mac OS X-flavored approach What you’ll learnMaster C programming, the gateway to programming your Mac or iPhone.Write applications for the Mac OS X interface, the cleanest user interface around.Understand variables and how to design your own data structures.Work with the file system.Connect to data sources and the Internet. Who is this book for For anyone wanting to learn to program in Mac OS X, including developers new to the Mac, developers new to C, or students entirely new to programming. For anyone who wants to learn how to program their iPhone, this is also the core language primer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #86518 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 3.00 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 376 pages

Customer Reviews

Dave Mark's Writing Style Makes This A Wonderful Book
I doubt that many people would consider reading a book about learning C to be fun but Dave mark has a wonderful writing style which makes this book very readable and, dare I say it, absorbing, all of which helps the information go in more easily.

I read the book with some C knowledge but it filled in a lot of gaps for me (my purpose for reading it so it gets a big tick for that) and it is riddled with useful notes which clarify the subjects and add useful bits of extra knowledge. I'm sure that someone totally new to C will also find the book easy to follow and very clear so it definitely comes highly recommended from me.

Excellent
This is an excellent book that delivers good information at a pace that can easily be understood by complete beginners and is also good for people with experience but coming from a much different background (say scripting languages for example). The book is very easy and enjoyable to read, and it provides exercises at the end of each chapter which helps concepts sink in. The last third of the book (as mentioned in another review) picks up the pace a little and deals with quite a few tricky subjects well but definitely requires slowing down and going over a few times to get the best from. In this part of the book, although well explained, there are parts that could maybe have been a few pages longer with an extra example. At the end of it I felt like I had a good overall understanding of the language and have found it a good platform to build on for learning Objective-C and now C++, well balanced in that it doesn't overload for a beginner book nor does it feel like there's not enough.

Book crippled by mistakes - there are better C books out there
The target audience for this book is people without any previous knowledge of programming.
The first few chapter are intended to help users to install Xcode and the Mac programming tools. After this there is no other Mac specific information and you could learn the language with any other C book for beginners.

The book is full of typos and conceptual mistakes, especially when describing key concepts of the language. Just a look at the errata page on the Apress website will give you an idea of the extent of the disaster. To make things worse the errata page is organised in chronological order of the error submissions and not in page order as you would normally expect.

My recommendation is to go through the Xcode tutorial on the Apple website and then use another C beginner book as guide.