Learning Carbon
 | Format: Paperback List Price: $34.95 Our Price: $9.41 Your Save: $ 25.54 ( 73% ) Availability: N/A Average Customer Rating:    |
Editorial Reviews:
Written for any developer with just a little C/C++ knowledge, Apple Computer's Learning Carbon provides an excellent introduction to the world of Mac development using the Carbon C API--which underlies the new Mac OS X--for creating state-of-the-art applications on this exciting new platform.
The focus of this book is to introduce the key tools and APIs you'll need to start writing Mac programs in C. The authors use a (rather fanciful) "Moon Travel Planner" application as the focus of this text. Beginning with hand-drawn mockups of the various screens in this simple program, they walk the reader through the steps required to bring the design to life. While providing enough background material for various APIs, there are plenty of step-by-step, hands-on exercises here for getting you started with development on today's Mac OS X platform.
Early sections look at the organization of Mac applications using the Project Builder tool. From here, it's on to designing the look and feel of the application using the Interface Builder tool. You'll learn basic resource design, from setting window properties to adding basic controls and creating menus. While this is extremely friendly material, other sections look at the nitty-gritty of programming with Carbon events, which is more difficult. (The authors will help get you started successfully with event handling. An appendix contains a listing of Carbon events and constants.)
Subsequent enhancements to the travel planner application include printing support (also an in-depth topic with sample code for basic printing support), file I/O (for saving and loading files), plus adding help files and even localization support (for bringing programs to international markets). Later sections cover the basics of integrating your new application into the desktop, including adding icons and properties.
While Carbon programming is undoubtedly a huge topic, this lively introduction can help new C/C++ programmers get started with development on the new Mac OS X, with or without previous Macintosh experience. Always clearly presented, this book is a great place to start with programming for today's Mac. --Richard Dragan
Topics Covered:
- Overview of the Carbon C API and the Mac OS X
- Hands-on tutorial for a sample travel itinerary application
- UI design guidelines
- Using the Project Builder for basic application design
- Using the Interface Builder to design windows (basic and advanced Carbon controls and tools)
- The Carbon event model and event handling (including calling and processing events)
- Designing menus and menu bars (visual design and menu event handling)
- Localization in Carbon (using multiple languages with language-specific folders and localized text)
- Printing conventions and APIs in Carbon (basics of printing, plus sample print code)
- Property lists
- Basic file I/O (including Mac file systems)
- Building HTML help
- Designing and working with Mac OS X icons
- Scriptable applications
- Threads and multiprocessing
- Tab controls
- Reference to Carbon events and parameters for common events
If you like "Learning Carbon, you might also like ...
 | Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition) |
 | Carbon Programming |
 | Beginning Mac OS X Programming |
 | Programming in Objective-C (Developer's Library) |
 | Quartz 2D Graphics for Mac OS X(R) Developers |
Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating:
Summary: Back to basics, A gentle introduction
Comment: Learning Carbon is a gentle introduction to the very basics of Carbon programming. It carries the reader over the foothills of Carbon development to give them a solid grounding in the fundamental concepts of the API. This book will also be of some value to application developers who are already familiar with the classic Mac OS programming APIs but who need to know about the nuances and special flavors that the Carbon application framework adds to the Mac OS.
As other reviewers have pointed out, this document covers many of the same areas as Apple's on-line developer documentation, but the value of the text is that it collects that documentation into one place and ties it together into a cohesive tutorial. The text is also able to go into a little more depth on some topics than the on-line documentation.
If you're looking for a comprehensive reference text, this book is not going to help you, but if you need to know about the fundamentals of developing applications with the Carbon framework then this book can teach them to you.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Well written but simply too short and too simplistic
Comment: If your a beginner who wants to learn just enough about Carbon to get by this might be the right book for you, so long as you use it along with Apples excellent Inside Mac OS X documentation and Project Builder. However if you are looking for a more detailed book which covers pretty much everything you need to know but were afraid to ask I would recommend Carbon Programming by Kevin Bricknell which is about 10 times longer. Learning Carbon is not a bad book, it will give you a good grasp of the "feel" of Carbon and is an excellent guide to Apples Developer Tools but it is neither an extensive tutorial nor a particularly good reference.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I hope there is better on the way...
Comment: This book disappointed me - I read the online docs that became "Learning Cocoa", and liked them quite a bit, so I expected a similar book in "Learning Carbon". I was wrong.
I bought both as hard copies because the Cocoa one was such a great little reference, but this book contains a number of errors in the samples, doesn't cover a lot of very relevant details, and doesn't give you a good "feel" for the Carbon API. I learned more reading through the headers for a few hours than I did from reading this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not quite shovelware, but hardly worth the price
Comment: Want to learn to write an application that runs in Mac OS X or Mac OS 9? You could buy this book... or you could look on your hard drive.
As shovelware goes, I've seen far worse -- Sun apparently thinks Java developers will pay $... or more for books that reprint freely-available API javadocs -- but "Learning Carbon" can't shake the fact that at least half of its contents are already installed as a part of the Mac OS X development tools.
Specifically, chapters 2-8 and 12 are substantially a rewrite of the PDF file "Moon Travel Tutorial: Creating a Carbon Application" that is installed with the Mac OS X dev tools (in the directory /Developer/Documentation/Carbon/pdf).
The rewrite is helpful, as it seems more aimed at non-Mac developers, taking time to explain concepts that are carried over from earlier versions of Mac OS. And the other chapters do address topics not directly handled by the "Moon Travel" PDF, such as property lists, printing, and file I/O.
Unfortunately, the book feels as much a tutorial on writing Carbon code with one specific tool, Apple's free "Project Builder", than on Carbon itself. I don't know that this book provides enough info for a developer to write Carbon apps with CodeWarrior, the most popular Mac development tool.
Hopefully, future Apple/O'Reilly books will feature more original content and at a greater level of detail. The Carbon API's are huge, and merit both tutorial-style and reference-style books.
It's understandable that "Learning Carbon" could have been rushed out as shovelware to give developers something to work with as soon as possible following the release of Mac OS X, but from companies with such good reputations as Apple and O'Reilly, it's surely a disappointment.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Start on MacOS X Programming!
Comment: This is the perfect book to get if you want to get started programming the Mac (OS X or OS 9). The Mac has two API's, Cocoa and Carbon. There is absolutely no difference in your application's performance when it comes to these two API's because they are based on the same internal code for OS X (Darwin). If you want to learn Cocoa, don't waste your money on the "Learning Cocoa" book, just go to Apple's online documentation and do the tutorials (they're the same as the book!).
Technical Details
Binding: PaperbackFormat: Bargain Price
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 357
Publication Date: 2001-05-16
