Submitted by Learn Objective-C with Xcode in the new free PDF book from Bert Altenburg, Alex Clarke and Philippe Mougin. Jump into Cocoa Development with some ready made classes and example code for XCode 2.0 and above. The book starts from scratch with basic programming knowlegde and ends up in the depth of Objective-C and Cocoa.
Become An X-Coder
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Right there on the last pages of Programming with Objective-C this one appears
Ah well I’m going to read Hillegass book after this one anyway…
The fonts on that site are so small, I could barely make out the links let alone words. Hardcoding fonts is a bad idea folks. 🙂
Oh thanks for the book.
Edited 2006-03-18 21:16
hmm.. what are you talking about? fonts here are normal size and ^+/- in firefox changed their sizes with no problems…?
ah, internet explorer won’t change their size… what browser are you using?
I’m using Epiphany-2.14 (which uses the Firefox/Gecko rendering engine) and the fonts are very small. I don’t have the best vision either, so it may just be my sensisitive eyes.
I agree with Mystilleef, the fonts as seen with FireFox on Windows XP are so small they look like fine print.
Changing the font size works fine in Safari and Firefox. I’m not sure why this is an issue. If you dont like it, change it. If your browser is broken and wont, get a different one.
I think the book is a great idea. The online (free) resources for ObjC and Cocoa development just keep getting better.
hint: You can change the font size on any site with CTRL-mousewhell, or CTRL-+/- 🙂
They look fine on Safari in OS X 10.4. That’s probably what was in mind when the site was designed. The authors of the book probably see little reason for Windows/Linux/BSD users to be reading a book about programming in XCode. 😉
This is how the site looks on Epiphany. Yes, I know how to change font size, but still…
http://www.deviantart.com/view/14143494/
Yeah, that’s completely off. What’s with the ginormous GNOME fonts though?
You should be able to set minimum font size in Firefox/Safari.
It doesn’t obey any of my font settings. I’m pretty sure the font size were hardcoded. If that is so, that’s just the wrong way to a design websites.
First off, I want to commend the authors for taking on an ambitious task. Their mission, according to the introduction to the book, is to take people from no programming experience all the way through to being able to develop rudimentary programs in Xcode. While I think that is overly ambitious for any book, it is certainly a near impossible task for a 63 page one.
I read the first few chapters in great detail, and I honestly think that a non-programmer will be lost within a few paragraphs. It is difficult for people like us who write code on a regular basis, and have for decades, to appreciate how foreign these concepts are to the average person. They started off going in the right direction, by providing some early analogies to algebra, but they quickly diverge from this methodology. Within a few pages they go through types, incrementing operators, naming conventions, compiler particulars and code “errors” that aren’t apparent to the end user. I refer specifically to their “error” in Chapter 1, Figure 5 that would run perfectly acceptably on most compilers, assuming the type is handled in preceding lines. Even with the description, that error will make no sense to the average person.
I think with some editing and expanding that book could be useful to people who are trying to understand programming from a beginners standpoint. You need to move much much slower. Considering you spent an entire chapter on code commenting, you should consider breaking the first chapter into smaller pieces. Have the reader “run” a program on paper in an example to see how code translates into execution. If you would like, I could donate some time to your endevour to help beef up that early section. While I won’t get it right either, I think I could help in that early translation process.
I believe what Mystilleef is trying to say is that the fonts should be set to their pt references and let the local font rendering engine of one’s operating system to scale accordingly.
I’ve been thinking about learning another language for a while. I suppose I might as well pick up Cocoa now. The book so far is pretty easy to follow. Nice catch OSNews!
Who is this book aimed at? If it’s aimed at beginner programmers, it doesn’t provide enough hand holding and like someone else said they will be quickly lost.
If it’s for experienced programmers looking to try out Objective-C, it focuses too much on beginner level stuff and doesn’t spend enough time with Objective-C, working the Xcode GUI (which can be quite a challenge) and it lacks information on Cocoa.
Not really worth reading, IMHO.