Exploration Through Example

I’m ready for people to review the first draft of my RubyCocoa book. Here’s the goal of the book:

With any complex framework, there’s a moment when you realize you finally have a feel for it—when faced with a new problem, you’re able to guess whether the framework addresses it, roughly how it will address it, and where to look to find the details. The aim of this book is to give you that feel for Cocoa and RubyCocoa. […]

You can fetch the most recent draft from http://www.exampler.com/tmp/drafts/current.dmg. It’s 80-some pages and contains the first six chapters:

• Introduction

• How Do We Get This Thing Started?: A fast introduction to RubyCocoa.

• Part 1: Building a Useful App

  • Working with Interface Builder and XCode: Drawing a user interface, putting code behind it, and debugging that code. Text fields and text views.

  • One Good App Observes Another: Extending the app to use interprocess communication to listen to another app. The Cocoa Notification system. Reopening Objective-C classes.

  • A Better User Interface: Buttons (and the default button), combo boxes (and first responders), and a highly decoupled app architecture.

  • Taking Advantage of Ruby: A DSL to make it easier to define actions, delegates, and methods that post or receive notifications.

Here’s what I’d like to hear about:

• Any parts you have to struggle to understand.

• Parts that move too slowly or too quickly.

• Whether the book is taking the right approach, or started with the right approach and has veered off track.

• Problems with the code samples. Don’t struggle to fix them—let me know and let me fix them.

• Whether you’d buy the book if the rest is like what you see.

Don’t bother with typos, grammatical errors, or layout problems (like highlighted words that run together or long identifiers that stick past the margins - those will get fixed in due time).

You can send comments to me directly or via the book’s mailing list.

Thank you.