Reviews for Objective-C Pocket Reference

1. Well, it's cheap

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, April 12th, 2010

   This book suffers from "spontaneous information". While the author is describing subject A, he seems to realize that he also needs to cover subject B, in order to give a good overview of subject A. This is a normal "problem" in books, but I still feel that the book could have been better planned, without too much effort.
   
   Since it's very cheap I'm giving it 3/5.

2. Superb Reference

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, November 12th, 2009

   No-one likes spending any longer than necessary reading technical books. We read these books because (we hope!) they are condensed instruction manuals, so after reading them, we know what to do, and can get on with it.
   
   This book achieves exactly that: it is compact and concise. It introduces what may be new concepts without any fanfares... it just states - very clearly - what the different parts of the language, and the Objective-C run-time (Cocoa or Cocoa Touch, for the iPhone and iPod touch), do.
   
   You will have to pay attention to the text in this book. There are very few diagrams, (although the examples of interfaces and implementations are neatly explained in Objective-C). If you come from a C, Java or C++ background, most of the verbal descriptions will be easy to comprehend. You may have to re-read some paragraphs, because there is so much information contained in this book, but re-reading should clarify the subject(s) for you. Duncan's writing style is fluid, accurate and not too dry - a welcome relief!
   
   Get this great value book if you need to learn Objective-C and already know C/C++ and don't want a "Dummy-style" explanation.
   
   One of the best O'Reilly books I have ever bought.

3. Very good concise reference

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, April 12th, 2009

   Does exactly what it suggests - gives a clear and concise reference to all the important aspects of Objective-C as a superset of C. For anyone with good C knowledge, this combined with the Apple & GNUstep documentation on the web will be all you need to take advantage of this delightful object-oriented paradigm which balances the speed & generality of C with a simple set of extensions which provide very significant power, much closer to the 'true' Smalltalk object model than the theoretically efficient but often infuriatingly obtuse mixed type/generic/object model of C++ which can become a nightmare to develop in.