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Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone: Creating Compelling Dynamic User Interfaces (Pragmatic Programmers) | 
 enlarge | Author: Bill Dudney
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
Buy New: $20.37
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New (36) Used (5) from $20.37
Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 11609
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Pages: 188
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 7.5 x 0.7
ISBN: 1934356107
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.437
EAN: 9781934356104
Publication Date: October 28, 2008
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Condition: Brand new Book, ALL days Low Price !
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Product Description
Mac OS X Leopard introduces a fantastic new technology that makes writing applications with animated and cinematic user interfaces much easier. We'll explore this new technology by starting with the familiar concepts you already know from the pre-Leopard development kits. Then we'll see how they apply to the new frameworks and APIs. We'll build on your existing knowledge of Cocoa and bring you efficiently up to speed on what Core Animation is all about. With this book in hand, you can add Core Animation to your Cocoa applications, and make stunning user interfaces that your user's will be showing off to their friends.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 Barely a book... January 3, 2009
W. A. Strand (Seattle)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book is 175 pages, but should probably be about 50 which is saying a lot considering how many photos there are. The text is really redundant and chatty, probably trying to get the book to enough pages to sell it. This is hands-down the worst Pramatic Bookshelf title I've read, though the author has written other material which is great so I don't know if this was just a rush to get published or what.
ALSO. And this is important...
If you're looking into this because you want to make stuff animate on the iPhone, save your money. The only iPhone stuff is the last chapter and is like 10 pages.
 The definitive textbook on the topic December 31, 2008
Brad Larson (Waupaca, WI United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Core Animation is a new technology in Mac OS X Leopard that has not been as widely adopted as I would have expected, I believe in large part because of the lack of documentation for it. This book is the only printed guide devoted to the topic, and I have found it invaluable in the development of several products. The Pragmatic Programmers series of books are always written and edited well, and this is no exception.
It is assumed that you are already familiar with Objective-C and the Cocoa APIs at the start of the book, so learning those fundamentals is required for new Mac and iPhone developers. The book also progresses as if you were an existing Mac programmer who will gradually incorporate more and more of Core Animation into your applications. This might cause a little impatience from those who want to jump right in to working with some of the more advanced capabilities, but those people can easily skip ahead to the relevant sections.
All of the important concepts are covered, although a couple of the tricks that I frequently use in my Mac and iPhone development are not mentioned. This is understandable, as they are not documented well and I only learned them from other developers. iPhone developers may be a little disappointed in the relatively small iPhone-only chapter, but that's simply because layer-based animations and the like are handled identically between the Mac and iPhone and there's little that is unique in the iPhone's implementation of Core Animation.
Source code examples for all exercises in the book are available at the publisher's website [...] and they contain many useful code snippets.
This book has earned its place on my desk.
THE Book to read if you want to understand Core Animation December 30, 2008
J. Lamarche (New Hartford, NY United States)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Core Animation is one of the coolest technologies to come out of Cupertino in many years. It makes doing all sorts of cool things in your application not just possible, but downright easy. Core Animation opens up worlds of possibilities for your applications' user interface.
The problem is, Core Animation is not intuitive. Even an experienced programmer can expect to spend a lot of time with Apple's documentation before he or she will grok the terminology and concepts of this new framework well enough to use be proficient.
Fortunately, the author has already gone through the trouble of doing that and has taken the time to break it all down into digestible chunks, explaining the concepts and terms in plain English, and setting out exercises that reinforce your understanding of those concepts.
As previous reviewers have mentioned, the bulk of the book focuses on using Core Animation when writing Mac programs, however both the basic concepts and the practical use of Core Animation are the same when programming the iPhone. The iPhone chapter explains the differences between using it on the two platforms and shows how to apply the stuff you've already learned earlier in the book when developing on the iphone.
I think this book probably reduced the amount of time I needed to learn Core Animation by at least half, probably more, and I'm an experienced programmer who's accustomed to learning from Apple's documentation.
Just a quick note of something that's probably obvious: You should already have a decent grasp on Objective-C and Cocoa before picking up this book if you want to get the most out of it.
Great book for learning Core Animation December 30, 2008
ctshryock
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book was well written and easy to follow. Starting with learning a bit about animation in cocoa before there was Core Animation, and then guiding you into using Core Animation in a way that makes sense and bridges the two, while clearly outlining the added benefits of the framework. The author gives you the right information to understand the concepts, provides clear examples, and sets you up to explore the framework with the skills you've learned.
You're shown existing code (that you can follow by downloading) and walked through each line and explained what's going on and why, which allows you to focus on what's there and really understand what's going on. This book is very efficient in that every paragraph teaches you something about Core Animation, all of which sum up to a cohesive understanding of the framework.
A book to have December 19, 2008
Alberto Paderno (Brescia, BS Italy)
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
The book describes well how to use the Core Animation framework in Cocoa applications to make the user interface more attractive.
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