Each of the 11 chapters of this book covers some aspect of Objective-C programming, mostly for Mac OS X and iOS. The beginning is very basic, describing how to use the command line and the Xcode development environment. This and the following three chapters are the only parts that might be of some interest to beginners. The recipes start in chapter two, which discusses string handling. The next chapter is about collections. Because Objective-C is influenced heavily by Smalltalk, some approaches described here are not used in many mainstream languages. Most notably, the treatment of blocks (closures) is fairly unique to Smalltallk and Objective-C (2.x). After the section on collections, the author introduces the handling of files and directories. The more complex chapters are about threads (chapter 6), memory management (chapter 8), object graphs (chapter 9), and core data programming (chapter 10).

The difficulty of the text is quite variable. The beginning is quite easy and should not be difficult to understand. The chapter about memory management is quite long and goes beyond the other chapters in the way it describes the rules for proper memory management. With the advent of garbage collection in Objective-C 2.0, the problems of manual memory management and reference counting have become much less difficult. But this only holds for Mac OS X. Therefore, reference counting especially is very important to Objective-C programmers. I found this chapter to be the most interesting and important.

The recipes themselves strictly follow a consistent outline, which starts with a statement of the problem, and is followed by the solution, explanation, complete code examples, and where and how to use the particular recipe.

The authors attempt to stick to certain code conventions, but cannot always do so. For example, where they can, they use the dot notation (.) introduced with Objective-C 2.0. It’s more familiar to C/Java/C++/C#/Eiffel programmers, but it cannot be used for anything but accessing properties.

In the preface, the author states: “At its core, this book is about exploring Objective-C in the language’s natural environment.” I understand that to mean on Mac OS X or iOS. If my understanding is correct, then chapter 11 seems out of place. This chapter explores “Objective-C Beyond Mac and iOS.” I do not think that these 15 or so pages really fit in with the rest of the book. Objective-C on anything but an Apple system is (nearly) nonexistent (but perhaps a little more existent in the Unix world). It would be difficult to find any large application written in Objective-C on Windows. In my opinion, it would have been better to leave this chapter out in favor of extending the other chapters.

My overall impressions of the book are mixed. I like parts of the book, especially chapters 2 through 6 and 8 through 10. However, the examples seem to jump around a bit between Mac OS X and iOS, which I found to be somewhat irritating. In addition, I feel that the eight-page index should have received a bit more attention.

This book should not be thought of as an introduction for beginners to programming or to Objective-C. Beginners should start with other books, such as Programming in Objective-C [1] or ones dedicated to Cocoa programming.