I read this book back to back with AppleScript--The Missing Manual. This book is interesting because it is geared at a strange demographic - serious programmers or wannabes that are new to the Mac. Xcode is Apple's integrated and free developer IDE. It could be compared to Metrowerks of yesterday or Visual Studio today. Like most interesting things on OSX, Xcode is a very useful GUI around some pretty solid UNIX under pinnings. At one level, Xcode is not much more than a GUI text editor with buttons for GCC. However, that would ignore Interface Builder. When I first saw the NeXT Cube, it was a weird "workstation" with very little on the desktop except for Interface Builder. The "hurdle" for using NeXT was simply, could you build the applications you need? NeXT Interface Builder (NIB) could create a text editor in a matter of moments. Now, under Xcode, applications can be built just as quickly, and in fact, the NeXT naming conventions like "nibs" stuck around.

This book explores the IDE in great detail. It is not a guide to programming for the Mac, but rather a book to teach you how to use the tool. I guess it could be considered analogous to an in-depth manual on Photoshop for someone that already knows art.

This book successfully explains Carbon vs Cocoa. Carbon was built to emmulate the old programming model for pre OSX days. It looks more like Pascal and tries to make porting easy. Cocoa is the Objective-C model inherited from NeXT.

This book is written with a wink-wink-nudge-nudge style. It is hip and modern, if you need that sort of thing in your computer manuals.

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