I have current copies of all of the BNR books. I also have the venerable “Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming”. I’ve picked up some of the Apress books over time, and even have some of the really old O’Reilly stuff like “Learning Cocoa”, “Learning Cocoa with Objective-C”, and “Building Cocoa Applications”. There’s some even more obscure stuff on that shelf (I can’t pass up a Mac book in the bargain bin, and I have serious trouble when they are selling for $0.01 on Amazon as well). The question is, is this stuff like fine wine, aging gracefully and maintaining its value, or is it more like a 55 gallon drum of toxic waste that is just waiting to leak all over me? Less metaphorically, is this stuff bad to even keep around due to the way things have changed?
With the way things have changed, you are more likely to find ways of doing things that either no longer work or have been improved upon. Probably not a good idea to use this books for anything other than nostalgia (this includes my 1st & 2nd editions as well!)
Cool, thanks Joe. I do have the third edition of your iOS Programming book, and even attended the iOS Bootcamp down there last year when you were just starting to cover ARC. Excellent course, by the way, and if anybody thinks it is too expensive send them to me for a reference. The all inclusive nature of how you folks position the expenses made my travel expense report a no-brainer. Now I’m trying to backfill some of my conceptual brainspace by going through the whole book set in order, starting with the Objective-C Programming book, and going up through the iOS material again. Trying to do a book a month, made it with the Objective-C book, we’ll see how I do on the Cocoa Programming one…