Product Description

There are several other books on programming for Mac OS X, but none of them comtain explanations of how to leverage the powerful underlying technologies. This book goes down to the real nitty-gritty of multi-threading, interprocess communication, networking, performance tuning, distributed objects, queues, Bonjour, authentication, the keychain, and directory services. The tools are also covered: gcc, gdb, subversion, Shark, and Saturn.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #108593 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 646 pages

Review
" ...clearly explains the tools and APIs that can radically improve the performance and reliability of your applications." -- -Eric Peyton

"...a must-have for any serious developer...it is the only book that...digs up real questions seeking real answers." -- -Review on OSNews.com

"...the book to have if you need to understand the plumbing that makes Mac OS X work." -- Eric Peyton

"...this book is a must-have for any serious developer..." -- OSNews.com

"I suspect this book will become a canonical reference, and may not be in need of a clever nickname." -- Slashdot

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Customer Reviews

Awesome book for anyone looking to learn low-level
This book fills in most gaps you might encounter while learning about the low-level BSD/Mach aspect of Mac OS X and Darwin. Mach and BSD iokit is described in detail, and there are tons of useful code examples all over the book. This book even explains ipc and pipes very well, and isn't the size of the bible, like other books. It gets to the point as soon as you get past the TOC.

Read This Book
If you're a Mac OS X developer and want to get serious about it, this book is mandatory. It is always on my desk right by the computer, and really is that perfect reference. Nothing really compares to this book, the previous Aaron Hillegass book is rather basic but is more of an introduction. I have a BS degree in CS and even though a lot of this has been covered, the rest of it is done in graduate school. So if you're looking for that little bit extra, give it a shot.

Probably more helpful for people with no/little Unix experience
Although this book is well written in concept, the editing of the final product is awful. There are a great deal of grammatical errors which seemed to me a basic word-processor would have caught.

The book should be titled, more correctly, "Unix Programming for OS X." Unix system programmers will find almost nothing new in this book (gcc, gdb, file-systems, signals, libraries, etc. - although, the Objective-C examples can be helpful in understanding how to implement things in new ways, and also the chapter on Subversion was a nice introduction for me.)

If you are just learning how to program on a Unix platform, I'd recommend this book unequivocally. I paid full price for mine ($70), without taking a hard enough look at the contents and found myself with an expensive, redundant book on my shelf.