macOS Good book or two for software development practice?

[zippyfly]

Hi guys - what's a good (no-nonsense?) book (or two) to read, for proper development process? From customer specs to iteration to finished project?

Ideally, specific/relevant to the Cocoa/Cocoa touch paradigms.

There are a ton of such books and I don't want to read 10 of them before wondering if those 10 were even useful or not.

Thanks!

 

[mdatwood]

These are not Cocoa specific, but anything Steve McConnell writes is pretty much great wrt to code writing and development processes.

http://www.stevemcconnell.com/books.htm

What you'll find is that books like Code Complete are timeless and applicable to any language or framework.

 

[Cabbit]

Sommerville Software Engineering 7,8 or 9

These are great books, personally i go by 7 as the extra chapters in 8 and 9 are a bit to clunky for the size of applications i develop.

 

[pilotError]

I'm reading this right now The Art of Agile Development

It is more about process and structure of Agile software development (extreme programming), the roles that everyone plays and how it all fits together.

It doesn't really talk about coding though if that's what your looking for.

 

[zippyfly]

OK thanks; these look like good starting points for exploration.

I'm looking for process (meta-programming) but if there are any materials that address specific idiosyncrasies of Cocoa/Cocoa touch (e.g., pros/cons of doing initial wireframes using Interface Builder, or what's the best way to design Objective-C UML object diagrams to plan out the architecture, etc.) then that would be even better.

Cheers.

 

[MorphingDragon]

OK thanks; these look like good starting points for exploration.

I'm looking for process (meta-programming) but if there are any materials that address specific idiosyncrasies of Cocoa/Cocoa touch (e.g., pros/cons of doing initial wireframes using Interface Builder, or what's the best way to design Objective-C UML object diagrams to plan out the architecture, etc.) then that would be even better.

Cheers.

The closest thing you could get for Cocoa would be this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Design-Patterns-Erik-Buck/dp/0321535022

But its not software practice, its more going nitty gritty into how Cocoa works.

 

[pilotError]

OK thanks; these look like good starting points for exploration.

I'm looking for process (meta-programming) but if there are any materials that address specific idiosyncrasies of Cocoa/Cocoa touch (e.g., pros/cons of doing initial wireframes using Interface Builder, or what's the best way to design Objective-C UML object diagrams to plan out the architecture, etc.) then that would be even better.

Cheers.

Hmmm, the problem is that design / architecture are language independent. There are some books centered around design patterns that use code as examples, but UML is usually pretty disconnected from code.

Here's two books that I can recommend,

Design Patterns
UML Distilled

Here's another that I haven't read, but might be more along the lines of what your looking for:

UML Distilled: Applying the Standard Object Modeling Language

Unfortunately Obj-C is such a small minority in the coding world, there haven't been many books (let alone good books) that bring these things to the table. Apple does have good PDF's on their developer site that are a worthwhile read.

 

[mdatwood]

Sommerville Software Engineering 7,8 or 9

These are great books, personally i go by 7 as the extra chapters in 8 and 9 are a bit to clunky for the size of applications i develop.

I have the Sommerville book sitting here from when I was in grad school. If anything it's very complete although not something I just want to sit down and read

Hmmm, the problem is that design / architecture are language independent. There are some books centered around design patterns that use code as examples, but UML is usually pretty disconnected from code.

Here's two books that I can recommend,

Design Patterns
UML Distilled

Here's another that I haven't read, but might be more along the lines of what your looking for:

UML Distilled: Applying the Standard Object Modeling Language

Unfortunately Obj-C is such a small minority in the coding world, there haven't been many books (let alone good books) that bring these things to the table. Apple does have good PDF's on their developer site that are a worthwhile read.

I agree that design and development practice are mostly disconnected from the language. Both the books you link too are good, although the DP book can be a bit hard to get into without any prior pattern exposure. The Head First series books are actually pretty good and they have one on design patterns.