Beta books are awesome

I feel like I spend more money on Beta books than real books.

For those of you not familiar with the Pragmatic Programmers they have a great concept called "Beta Books". When they have a book idea, instead of sitting on it for a year and half before it's completed, they give it to the world in Beta form. The idea is simple enough: A good book, like good software, needs time to iterate in order to make it better. Beta books normally come out months before the actual release date and the authors and community of Beta readers start a dialogue. It's all very Agile. Readers can do simple things like point out typos and grammar problems, or more ambitious readers can critique the actual content, suggest better ways of implementing something or suggest additional content. In fact, if you look through some of the Pragmatic Programmer Forums you can see that some books went through significant changes before going to the presses. This process is fantastic and provides a better product in the end.

The latest in this series is a real gem, Cocoa Programming: A Quick-Start Guide for Developers.

I love this book for a lot of reasons but the main one has to be that I read and followed through the entire Beta Book (around 100 pages) in two nights. I wasn't rushing, but I moved through it quickly. I was excited to read more. I wanted to learn more! The idea of the book is to give programmers with no Objective-C or Cocoa experience a Feet First look at the language and more importantly, the tools that Mac OSX provides for building awesome Cocoa and iPhone applications. (Not totally true, because of the Apple NDA, they can't give much detail about the iPhone SDK, but most of the Cocoa topics apply so it's all good).

Daniel Steinberg does a really good job at getting you excited about the language and frameworks really early on. In true Agile form, you make little things that work throughout each chapter. In fact, your first project is to build a Web Browser. Yes... a browser. Granted, this is no Chrome or Safari but suddenly seeing how you might build your own robust one is not so far off. The book also encourages the courageous and inquisitive programmer to explore more advanced topics that he doesn't feel necessary to cover due to the scope of the book. All in all, this Beta book is shaping up for a great finish. I can't wait to re-read it as the iterations are released.

Thanks to Pragmatic Team for once again delivering books that I actually want to read!

Kent