Vikram Vaswani: PHP Programming Solutions. New York et.al 2007 (McGraw-Hill)
The observant reader will notice that this is not a book about Cocoa. It is, however, a book that gets it right, and of all the computer books I’ve read and attempted to read, it is handsdown my favorite.
This is a reference work, split into twelve chapters, each dealing with an area of problems programmers encounter again and again. Working with strings, functions, files, HTML…
If ever you find yourself wondering ‘how do I do X’ this is the book to consult: once you have defined your problem (I want to include a header, I want to send e-mail, I want to split content into pages) you can find a solution. And not only does the solution come with code printed where you can see it, this book gives you comments, warnings about what you need to consider, quite often giving you ways of extending the functionality, mentioning alternatives, comparing the PHP behaviour to other languages… in short, you don’t just get a function, you get its context, too.
I would not *quite* sell my firstborn to get a similar book for Cocoa – I have an acute shortage of firstborns – but that kind of resource would be invaluable.
I’m reviewing this book – and reviewing it first – to prove that providing useful resources is possible and has, in fact, been done for other languages. Since Cocoa programming is not _just_ about the Objective C language but also about using Cocoa-specific design patterns, a Cocoa equivalent would take a different form, but the first step has been made: after someone worked out how to efficiently present information so users can speed up their programming tenfold, ‘all’ that is left now is to fill in the gaps with actual information.