Thursday, January 19th, 2006

I recently got the book "Programming with Quartz" as a gift from Richard Blanchard (for putting together a quick build of FlySketch which supported 10.3's PDF Services last year for a WWDC demo). I was already thinking of getting the book, so it was good timing on his part (for me anyway). I've not finished it yet, but I can already say that it's a really good book if you are wanting to hook into the awesome 2d graphics capabilities of Mac OS X.

I spent some time a couple of years ago porting a java app which used pdflib (xml to pdf / layout engine) over to using Apple's Quartz libraries, and man.. I wish I had this book back then. I'm learning a ton of new stuff, and it even goes over the newer apis in 10.4 and a bit of history which is pretty interesting.

But don't take just my word for it (I have a slight bias against it obviously). I asked Jonathan Wight if he thought it was worth it and his response was "Damn straight, worth every penny. That and mark's books are the best mac os x dev books i have right now.".

So two thumbs up for "Programming with Quartz" (and thanks Rich!).

-- posted 5:20 pm