Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

by Mark Dalrymple, Aaron Hillegass

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780321706256
Publisher:	Big Nerd Ranch Guides
Publication date:	09/01/2011
Series:	Big Nerd Ranch Guides Series
Pages:	552
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Mark Dalrymple, the Advanced Mac OS X instructor at Big Nerd Ranch, has been a Macintosh programmer since 1985 and a professional Unix programmer since 1990.

Mark has experience on the client side and server side, being a veteran of several startups and larger technology operations like AOL and Google. On the back-end, he has been the technical lead for AOLserver, a high-performance web server handling tens of thousands of hits per second on many different Unix platforms (Linux, HP, SGI, Digital Alpha, Solaris). On the client-side, he has worked with native Mac toolkits, helped in the construction of cross-platform toolkits, and currently has code running on millions of Macintosh desktops world-wide.

Mark is principal author of Learn Objective-C on the Macintosh and has been the technical reviewer for many Cocoa and iPhone titles with Apress. He is also the co-founder of CocoaHeads, the international Mac programmer's group, with chapters in 26 countries on five continents.

Table of Contents

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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

Editorial Reviews

“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

From the Publisher