Customer Rating: 
Summary: Resist the urge to dismiss
Comment: I've known about this book for a while now, but I've never bothered paying attention to it given it's somewhat ridiculous price tag. Necessity forced me to forgo my earlier conclusions however, and I'm now angry at myself for not picking it up sooner. However much you think you know about Quartz, there's always more to learn, and this book is a whole lot easier to pick new tricks up from than Apple's scant free documentation. It's a bit dated when it comes to the XCode specific info, but unless you're a total newcomer you should be able to fill in the proverbial gaps there without much trouble.
This is the second book on OS X programming that I have felt is truly worth owning; the first being Amit Singh's "Mac OS X Internals." This one's not as thick, nor is it hardbound, but there are lots of color plates. Good stuff.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Comment: If all of the Apple frameworks were explained as well as CoreGraphics/Quartz is in this book, life would be so much better for independent programmers. I am not writing code in XCode, but one where I need to port calls to custom classes. This book has helped me so much. I have not located the link on the publisher's site (maybe I'm just missing it), but my only complaint (a very minor one) would be that they don't have a contact email for the authors to report errata or thank them.
Well written, to the point, good code examples and does not duplicate the Apple documents. Covers Carbon and Cocoa calls. The chapters on axial and radial shadings were the most helpful for me.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Introduction to Quartz
Comment: Great programming guide to Quartz. This book really sets the example for how to provide the combination of concepts and code to get the new user over the hump. The XCode projects are beautifully organized. This is the best book I have bought on Macintosh Programming that I can recall. Well done!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Very good
Comment: This is an extremely comprehensive guide to drawing in Mac OS X with Quartz. I was a little disappointed in the lack of Cocoa (with objective-C) ties. You can do anything with Quartz, but sometimes it would take much less time to use the Cocoa equivalents when programming your OS X applications.
That said, it's well written, and easy to follow so long as you do the examples as you go. You can certainly hop around in the book, but I found I had to read the intro chapters twice to really get the terminology.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best book for beginning Quartz programmers
Comment: Quartz 2D is the primary graphics library in Mac OS X and is based on version 1.4 of Adobe PDF. It supercedes QuickDraw, which was used in earlier versions of the Mac OS. In Quartz 2D the coordinate space is an abstract concept defined by real values in 2 dimensions. Points in this space can be connected to form paths, such as straight lines, Bezier curves and so on. To create actual graphics on the display, the paths are rasterized as needed to generate the pixels at the display device's resolution. This permits the same graphics commands to yield the same output on any device using the best resolution available.
This book is full of clear explanations for mere mortals of how Quartz has packaged the state of the art in graphics programming. The book starts out with Quartz 2D drawing basics such as drawing and filling basic geometric forms and drawing lines. With the basics out of the way, the author goes on to show how you would use Quartz 2D both in Cocoa and in Carbon. Next there are chapters on basic computer graphics intertwined with performing these tasks in Quartz. Included topics are coordinate systems, affine transformations, and parametric curves all within the framework of performing graphics in Quartz. The book then moves on to working with images including creating CGImage objects, and importing and exporting data to PNG, JPEG, and Quicktime formats. Another chapter is devoted to working with text. There are two chapters devoted to working with PDF data, including a chapter on handling PDF images that is very thorough in its descriptions and the issues that are raised. The book is very well written and covers many complex topics in 2D graphics clearly and at a level appropriate for all programmers, and I highly recommend it for all programmers interested in Quartz.
|
