Mastering XCode 4: Develop and Design

If you are used, as I am, to programming in Visual Studio on Windows, trying to write programs in Apple’s Mac IDE, XCode, is an uphill struggle.

Not only am I still unfamiliar with the conventions of the Mac interface itself, but I am also new to the main XCode language, Objective-C, and its associated Cocoa framework. On top of all that, I can’t figure out how to get XCode to do the things that are second nature to me in Visual Studio.

Mastering XCode 4 is aimed at someone just like me. It claims that it will guide me through all the XCode tools and show me how to write and debug an app using the Cocoa framework. OK, so how well did it succeed?

In brief, the answer is: it succeeded… up to a point. The book gives a good account of the XCode tools and it explains fundamental concepts such as nib and xib files (which store visual design information), actions and outlets (the XCode way of delegating event-handlers for controls). It goes on to describe the essentials of the code editor such as the use of code snippets, auto-completion and refactoring. And it gives useful guidance on other essential tools such as the user interface designer and the debugger.

What the book doesn’t do is make any attempt to explain how to program in Objective-C. It does provide some very, very simple bits of Objective-C code, but only the minimum required to let the reader follow along and create some working programs. It doesn’t explain the language itself, nor does it cover anything other than the very elementary features of the Cocoa framework. So, while it does indeed, tell you how to write programs for OS X and iOS, it won’t give you a deep understanding of how those programs work or what you need to do to master programming on those platforms.

Let me say a few words about the design of this book. It’s printed in full colour on good quality paper, the layout is clean and attractive and it is organized into logically themed chapters: Discovering XCode Tools, Starting A Project, Navigating A Project and so on.

So, in brief, this is a nice looking, well-designed book which, however, limits itself strictly to the use of the XCode IDE. If that is the sort of book you are looking for, this will do the job nicely. Even so, I think an argument could be made that you really can’t learn to use an IDE without also learning to program one of its supported languages. Personally, I would have found this book much more useful if it had given examples of XCode being used in the development of longer, more complex Objective-C programs. The plain fact of the matter is that if you are already an Objective-C programmer on the Mac there is a very good chance that you know your way around XCode pretty well. If, on the other hand, you are new to XCode you will probably also be new to Objective-C and it would be advantageous to have a book that devotes equal space to both the IDE and the programming language.