#18 Objective C - Kurz & Gut | Book Review
Objective C Kurz & Gut by Lars Schulten
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Context & Why I read this book
For my new job, I had to prepare myself and refresh my knowledge of Objective-C. This seemed to be a good and quick overview.
What is the book about as a whole?
The title pretty much sums it up. It’s a short introduction to the programming language Objective-C, which is a superset of C, extending it by OO concepts.
The book’s structure
The book comes in handy pocket format, is comprised of 15 main chapters of different lengths and contains some language reference chapters and an index at the end.
- Basics
- Syntax
- Objects
- Classes
- Categories
- Protocols
- Errors and Exceptions
- NSObject
- Object Life Cycle
- Memory Management
- Runtime information
- Messaging
- Key/Value-Coding
- Object Archiving
- Blocks
- NSObject Reference
- Compiler Directive Reference
- Alternative Platforms
- Clang Operation Reference
One lesson
Obviously, in reading this, I learned and refreshed some of my knowledge about the language syntax and peculiarities. Especially interesting however was some of the side information given, e.g. the relationship to the C language, concepts like Monkey Patching, and some best practices.
Reading Recommendation / Who should read this?
The book itself is okay; it mostly does what it’s supposed to. Due to the fact that Objective-C is a kind of “obsolete” language, I would not recommend reading this, unless you’ll join some heavy legacy project soon. Overall this is a 6 out of 10 (⭑⭑⭑) for me (“OK; the average read. Tangible weaknesses, but recommended with some reservations”).