Re: What is the status on the New Cocoa 2.0 Books?

FROM : Jeff LaMarche
DATE : Thu Mar 13 05:22:26 2008

On Mar 12, 2008, at 11:03 PM, Jens Alfke wrote:

> (Actually, the current docs are quite good, all things considered. 
> Back in the day, the system documentation used to consist of badly-
> Xeroxed copies of napkins that the programmers had scrawled some 
> instructions on, while suffering from exhaustion and caffeine 
> psychosis. And the developer program charged you $1200 a year for 
> those, and didn't even give you a damn binder to put them in. And we 
> lapped it up!)


Actually, I've been spending a lot of time reading Apple documentation 
since last Thursday or so, and I was just thinking that Apple's 
technical documentation has gotten very, very good - we're downright 
spoiled, especially all the documentation for that new thing we're not 
allowed to discuss here yet but could for a few minutes the other day.

But it is what it is - it's professional API documentation targeted at 
third party developers who don't need much handholding on basic 
concepts. There will always be a market for good books that take the 
newcomer by the hand and explain things more slowly and and use a lot 
of examples to drive home important points. Not a very big market, 
perhaps,  in the case of Cocoa or Objective-C books, but a market 
nonetheless.