Programming Cocoa with Ruby: Create Compelling Mac Apps Using RubyCocoa

by Brian Marick

This is a book for the Ruby programmer who's never written a Mac app before. Through this hands-on tutorial, you'll learn all about the Cocoa framework for programming on Mac OS X. Join the author's journey as this experienced Ruby programmer delves into the Cocoa framework right from the beginning, answering the same questions and solving the same problems that you'll face.

Together you'll build a single application that threads throughout the book, and it's not a toy. You'll cover topics that may not be the flashiest parts of Cocoa, but they're ones you'll need to know to create robust, feature-rich applications for yourself. And you'll learn more than just Cocoa and RubyCocoa, you'll get first-hand effective agile development practices. You'll see test-first development of user-interface code, little domain-specific languages that take advantage of Ruby features, and other Rubyish tricks.

At the end of the book, you'll be ready to write a real Mac OS X application that can be distributed to real users.

Genres: Computers, Programming

300 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2008

About the author

Brian Marick first learned to program in 1976, using the Tutor language. He has since done real programming in C, Common Lisp, Java, Ruby, Clojure, Elixir, and Elm. Much of his career, though, has been spent consulting, first on software testing, then–after he lucked into being one of the authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development–on testing and programming on Agile teams. He's written four books, three of which you can still buy: The Craft of Software Testing (horribly out of date), Everyday Scripting with Ruby, and Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer (almost entirely about dynamically-typed functional languages). He's currently trying to make a modest living writing webapps for schools of veterinary medicine, deliberately using advanced languages and techniques so that he has real-world examples to use in books, training, and consulting.