Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, 3rd Edition

09/28/2011 · No Responses

While there are several books on programming for Mac OS X, Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide is the only one that contains explanations of how to leverage the powerful underlying technologies. This book gets down to the real nitty-gritty. The third edition is updated for Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 and covers new technologies like DTrace, Instruments, Grand Central Dispatch, blocks, and NSOperation.

Review
“Mark and Aaron’s Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming quickly became my favorite development book. It was the first book to cover the advanced topics not discussed elsewhere. I excitedly read it from cover to cover, eagerly eating up the information on topics I had never examined before. Advanced Mac OS X Programming is an incredible sequel, covering the new Mac OS X technologies that have emerged since. This book goes into a level of detail not offered by other documentation, but also includes easy to follow examples. After reading it, you’ll impress your peers with your clear understanding of advanced Mac OS X programming.”
—John A. Vink, television host and software engineer

“Advanced Mac OS X Programming has long been a required text and source of curriculum for my 10-week Mac and iOS programming course. This new edition brings anticipated updates covering the latest Apple developer technologies. The fresh content keeps this classic book relevant and critical to programmers of all levels working on Apple’s platforms. There is simply no other collection of published material that covers these advanced topics with equal depth and skill.”
—Chris Parrish, co-founder of RogueSheep, Incorporated, Mac and iOS programming instructor

“Many books will introduce you to the basics of Mac OS X programming. Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide aims for much more, laying out a course for becoming a seasoned expert in many of the nitty-gritty details of developing for the platform.”
—Daniel Jalkut, Red Sweater Software

Table of Contents
Introduction
1. C and Objective-C
2. The Compiler
3. Blocks
4. Command-Line Programs
5. Exceptions, Error Handling, and Signals
6. Libraries
7. Memory
8. Debugging with GDB
9. DTrace
10. Performance Tuning
11. Files, Part I: I/O and Permissions
12. Files, Part II: Directories, File Systems, and Links
13. NSFileManager — Cocoa and the File System
14. Network Programming with Sockets
15. CFRunLoop
16. kqueues and FSEvents
17. Bonjour
18. Multiprocessing
19. Using NSTask
20. Multithreading
21. Operations
22. Grand Central Dispatch
23. Accessing the Keychain