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NSNick

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 27, 2008
162
0
Washington D.C.
Is "Advanced Mac OS X Programming (2nd Edition of Core Mac OS X & Unix Programming) by Mark Dalrymple, Aaron Hillegass" still relevant seeing as it was last published in October of 2005 or has it been made obsolete?
 

yeroen

macrumors 6502a
Mar 8, 2007
944
2
Cambridge, MA
From what I've seen of the book, much of it is dedicated to UNIX "systems" programming, and the book could almost be renamed 'UNIX programming for OS X". That is, it covers UNIX signals, terminal I/O, IPC, BSD sockets, pthreads, the GNU compiler suite and Apple's extensions to it, etc. Much of this and more is covered in greater depth in the standard reference for the subject: Steven's 'Advanced Programming in the UNIX environment', but the exposition in 'Advanced Mac OS X Programming' is more streamlined and cherry picked.

The audience for the book seems to be mainly those who may have some experience developing in some high level language or framework like Cocoa or Java and who want to delve deeper into OS X's Darwin layer. That being so, given the 2005 publishing date, it wouldn't be in any way out of date, even those parts dealing with Apple's proprietary APIs (Core Foundation, etc.), which are the only things that would have changed in the interim (and they haven't). All told, it's a valuable complement to those OS X books dealing strictly with Cocoa/Obj-C.
 

kalimba

macrumors regular
Jun 10, 2008
102
0
As a related aside, this text is now available at Amazon for around $45. I added to my shopping cart when it was back-ordered and about $70. When I logged in recently, I was informed that not only was it available, but the price had dropped significantly (I minor miracle in itself, considering how most of the prices at Amazon have been steadily rising). Even the seller on eBay who was selling the book for $80 or $90 has dropped their price to be more in line with the Amazon price.
 

laprej

macrumors regular
Oct 14, 2005
108
2
Troy, NY
I gotta agree with yeroen, except that I was a little upset with the book when I discovered the content. They make it sound like all these amazing underground APIs when, in fact, they're just referring to the UNIX stuff underlying OS X. I have plenty of books on those topics thank you very much!
 
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