🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <86181@ut-emx.uucp> mikael@scout.utexas.edu (Mikael Behrens) writes:
> J.B. Nicholson-Owens writes
> | I've read only one review of G&M's recently-released book, of those  
> |  
> | that have read it, would you post your opinion of the quality of the  
> book and why you feel the way you do about it?

As a NeXTStep neophyte with a very limited knowledge of C (and virtually no  
previous knowledge of objective-C), I found Garfinkel and Mahoney's book to be  
not only very informative, but surprisingly enjoyable reading. The range of  
material presented (object oriented programming, NeXT development tools and  
standard objects, threads, basic PostScript, event handling, defaults database  
access, etc.) is extensive. They make no claims of comprehensiveness, but  
sufficient material is given to enable a meaningful foray into all of these  
areas. More importantly, everything is presented in the most meaningful context  
possible: development of full-blown applications. Their example applications  
are well chosen both in terms of being relevant and interesting to a wide  
audience as well as providing an appropriate setting for applying all of the  
tools which they present. The difficulty and complexity of the examples  
progresses fairly smoothly so that the numerous hurdles of understanding which  
must be overcome seem relatively tractable at the time when they are reached.  
The book was written with obvious care and contains surprisingly few typos.  
Source code is provided on an accompanying disk and, with very few exceptions,  
it works as expected. The examples presented essentially provide just the sort  
of annotated templates that a newcomer needs to begin fashioning his or her own  
apps. All in all, I enjoyed reading Step One; I learned a lot from it; and I  
strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about NeXTSTEP programming.

_______________________________________________________________
Duane Storti			University of Washington
storti@u.washington.edu		Mechanical Engineering, FU-10
				Seattle, WA 98195