Learning C on the Mac: Wave I
February 11th, 2009Excited about my new Macbook Pro, received as a birthday present from my wife and children, I wanted to jump right in and start coding some useful plugins. However, I was a bit premature jumping into an Objective-C and Cocoa world before having the solid foundation of a C development background. Although Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, Third Edition, is an excellent book and gave me several pointers in the correct direction, without the proper OOP background and Cocoa C development experience, I found it a bit challenging to navigate my way through the Mac development environment.
Published by Apress: Learn C on the Mac, by Dave Mark
I decided to slow down a bit and purchase the most recent book I could find on the subject, Learn C on the Mac, by Dave Mark. Just published last month by one of my favorite publishers, Apress, this text appeared to be the most up to date on the topic for my purposes. A quick scan of the first three chapters proved me right. A simple, straightforward writing style, allows readers to have fun, rather than feel like they’re working.
Chapter One highlights the book’s intended audience and “lay of the land.” The free Mac programming tools, the download and install instructions are covered in Chapter Two. XCode is Apple’s free suite of programming tools available for download from the Apple Developer Connection. After creating an ADC Account, downloading and installing the XCode tools, you will be ready to begin programming. After starting up XCode, the author walks the reader through the simple task of creating the standard “Hello World!” program (without writing a single line of code).
For readers entirely new to programming in any language, Chapter Three reviews the basics of application programming from creating source code and compiling it into machine language, or object code, the computer can understand. The linker creates the final, runnable application by linking all the project’s object code together. Syntax or semantics; source and object; these are the beginnings of C programming on the Mac.
… I cannot wait to see what Chapter Four has to offer.