Advanced Mac OS X Programming

Mark Dalrymple, the Advanced Mac OS X instructor at Big Nerd Ranch, has been a Macintosh programmer since 1985 and a professional Unix programmer since 1990. Mark has experience on the client side and server side, being a veteran of several startups and larger technology operations like AOL and Google. On the back-end, he has been the technical lead for AOLserver, a high-performance web server handling tens of thousands of hits per second on many different Unix platforms (Linux, HP, SGI, Digital Alpha, Solaris). On the client-side, he has worked with native Mac toolkits, helped in the construction of cross-platform toolkits, and currently has code running on millions of Macintosh desktops world-wide. Mark is principal author of Learn Objective-C on the Macintosh and has been the technical reviewer for many Cocoa and iPhone titles with Apress. He is also the co-founder of CocoaHeads, the international Mac programmer's group, with chapters in 26 countries on five continents.

' Introduction 1. C and Objective-C 2. The Compiler 3. Blocks 4. Command-Line Programs 5. Exceptions, Error Handling, and Signals 6. Libraries 7. Memory 8. Debugging with GDB 9. DTrace 10. Performance Tuning 11. Files, Part I: I/O and Permissions 12. Files, Part II: Directories, File Systems, and Links 13. NSFileManager -- Cocoa and the File System 14. Network Programming with Sockets 15. CFRunLoop 16. kqueues and FSEvents 17. Bonjour 18. Multiprocessing 19. Using NSTask 20. Multithreading 21. Operations 22. Grand Central Dispatch 23. Accessing the Keychain

"'Advanced Mac OS X Programming' has long been a required text and source of curriculum for my 10-week Mac and iOS programming course. This new edition [...] keeps this classic book relevant and critical to programmers of all levels working on Apple's platforms. There is simply no other collection of published material that covers these advanced topics with equal depth and skill."

—Chris Parrish, co-founder of RogueSheep, Inc. and Mac and iOS programming instructor

"I excitedly read [the first edition of this book] from cover to cover, eagerly eating up the information on topics I had never examined before. 'Advanced Mac OS X Programming' is an incredible sequel, covering the new Mac OS X technologies that have emerged since. This book goes into a level of detail not offered by other documentation, but also includes easy to follow examples. After reading it, you'll impress your peers with your clear understanding of advanced Mac OS X programming."

—John A. Vink, television host and software engineer

"Many books will introduce you to the basics of Mac OS X programming. 'Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide' aims for much more, laying out a course for becoming a seasoned expert in many of the nitty-gritty details of developing for the platform."

—Daniel Jalkut, Red Sweater Software