From: woolf@isi.edu (Suzanne Woolf)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.misc
Subject: Re: Any reviews of Garfinkel & Mahoney's book?
Date: 8 Jan 93 22:38:58 GMT
Organization: Information Sciences Institute, Univ. of So. California


In article <C0DJJ8.2HD@news.cso.uiuc.edu> jeffo@uiuc.edu (J.B. Nicholson-Owens) writes:
>Michael B. Johnson writes
>[a great review in favor of the book]
>
>I should have said this before, but also hearing from people who
>don't already know how to program for the NeXT would be valuable.  I 

You said you didn't want to hear from people who hadn't seen the
published version, which I haven't yet; I was one of the
pre-publication reviewers.  However, I'll boldly jump in anyway.
Since I hope to get my copy soon, I'll retract any of this that's
changed since I saw the manuscript :-)

>appreciate Michael B. Johnson's review, however I would also like to
>know if there's anything missing in the book; something whose absence
>is noticed by a beginner, but for an experienced NeXTSTEP programmer
>would be something assumed or just known (and therefore not thought
>about).

I got to review it by answering a request (here on the net) for
"beginning programmers" who wanted to review it.  When I started, my
qualifications were: Systems administration and user support on
various flavors of Unix, including NeXTs; some college programming
courses, including C; and no NeXTSTEP programming at all-- I knew
NeXTSTEP only as a user.

I found that the authors started by assuming even less experience than
I had.  Familiarity with programming in general and C in particular is
assumed, familiarity with NeXTSTEP even as a user isn't.  It goes
quickly enough to cover a lot of ground, and it takes effort to keep
up, but (IMHO) they don't leave the less experienced programmer
behind.

If you don't have a working knowledge of C, or Unix, or programming
style/technique issues (modular design, etc.) you might want to start
someplace else, because the code examples might not make much sense to
you; some design decisions, for instance, might be confusing.

Otherwise, you'll probably find it's aimed at people with a working
knowledge of programming who want to learn Objective-C and get a start
on understanding and effectively using the NeXTSTEP programming
environment by writing code and watching what it does.  It is *not* a
substitute for the reference documentation, but if you've looked at
the reference documentation, decided you weren't sure how to tackle
it, and longed for someone to help you find a place to start, this
book is it.

I hope this answers your question....

>I assume that this book is aimed at beginners only because it doesn't
>make much sense, to me, to talk to experts about how to program with
>NeXTSTEP.

I'm not sure what you mean.  If you mean "It doesn't make sense to
write a book for experts on how to program with NeXTSTEP," I don't
agree-- experts can learn new stuff too, and they'd better if they
want to keep being experts in a field that changes as fast as ours.

But, agreed that this book isn't really for experts.  It probably
doesn't have too much to say to someone with extensive experience
writing code in multiple languages, who already understands OOP and
GUI principles, and who can spend a lot of time reading the reference
documentation and writing code-experiments.  But any of us
less-advanced folk can probably learn a lot from the book.

Suzanne
woolf@isi.edu