MacRuby: The Definitive Guide
Matt Aimonetti
Copyright 2011 Matt Aimonetti
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Dedication
Pour ma fille, Giana,
Et pour ma femme, Heidi: merci pour ton soutien, tes encouragements, et ta comprhension. Sans toi, ce livre naurait jamais vu le jour.
Preface
MacRuby is Apples implementation of the Ruby programming language on top of the Objective-C technology stack. It allows developers to write native applications for the Cocoa environment using the popular Ruby syntax as well as the well-known and robust Objective-C and C libraries.
This book provides a guide to OS X development for MacRuby developers. Key concepts of MacRuby and Cocoa, as well the popular Cocoa APIs, are covered in this book. The book should help you leverage your existing programming knowledge to make you an efficient and productive MacRuby developer.
I became interested in MacRuby after many years working on/with/around Ruby web frameworks. I started using MacRuby after meeting Laurent Sansonetti (MacRuby lead developer at Apple). Laurent showed me that MacRuby had some interesting things to offer: a programming language that I liked as well as some great APIs and tools that allowed me to develop desktop applications easily and access some cool hardware resources .
This book was written using a version of MacRuby just prior 1.0. All the Xcode screenshots were created using Xcode 4.x. Most, if not all, of the content should be valid for MacRuby 1.x. and later versions.
The Purpose of This Book
The purpose of this book is to:
Teach MacRuby fundamentals.
Provide a guide to develop Cocoa applications using the MacRuby language.
Show concrete examples leveraging the Cocoa technology using MacRuby.
My personal goal is to provide you with a solid foundation, allowing you to understand how MacRuby is meant to be used and why things are designed the way they are. While this book is neither a Ruby book nor a Cocoa book, it should provide you with enough information to understand the MacRuby environment and create rich applications for the OS X platform.
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this book, you should have some programming experience and be familiar with the basics of object-oriented programming. I also assume some very basic knowledge of Ruby, because there are so many places to pick up that knowledge and the language is pretty simple. If you arent familiar with Ruby yet, go to the Ruby language website and read up. Youll get more out of this book if you do that first. If you are already familiar with Ruby but would like to learn more, I recommend the excellent book, The Ruby Programming Language , by David Flanagan and Rubys creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto.
Also, even though we are going to cover some of the basics, understanding some fundamental Cocoa concepts will help. You can learn more about Cocoa as you go along, but should you find something confusing in this book, here are places to look for more information:
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Using Code Examples
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