There are several other books on programming for Mac OS X, but none of them comtain explanations of how to leverage the powerful underlying technologies. This book goes down to the real nitty-gritty of multi-threading, interprocess communication, networking, performance tuning, distributed objects, queues, Bonjour, authentication, the keychain, and directory services. The tools are also covered: gcc, gdb, subversion, Shark, and Saturn.
I was expecting this book to teach me about more advanced concepts in the Mac development world. But I found that:
• It often read more like a reference than a tutorial or guide. So it will provide value if I attempt some of the things spelled out in this book, but it didn't do me much good to read through it beforehand. • Most of the concepts were more about writing OS-specific C and weren't directly relevant to Cocoa development. I probably should have expected this, given that the word Cocoa isn't in the title, but I didn't.