Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

Find out how to leverage the powerful underlying technologies of Mac OS X by getting into the real nitty-gritty of multi-threading, interprocess communication, networking, performance tuning, distributed objects, kqueues, Bonjour, authentication, the keychain, and directory services. The tools are also covered: gcc, gdb, subversion, Shark, and Saturn.

Programmers who are new to the platform will appreciate the guide's learn-while-doing approach. Each chapter introduces or further develops an application that's been carefully designed and tested to teach concepts and provide real experience. Some apps are small stubs completed in a chapter. Others span chapters and offer practice working with complex apps and advanced tools like Xcode, Interface Builder, and Instruments.

Table of Contents

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