As the author of a developer book, I’m rather persnickety (what an odd word) about what I look for when considering a book to learn a new language, tool or technology. As I head down the path of reviewing books on this blog, I want to provide more than a simple overview of the book and its contents. My intention is to create a review process that will offer enough information such that you can walk away and feel you have what you need to make an informed decision about whether a specific book could meet your needs.
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Although we were quickly gaining interest in the iPhone developer forum that I just announced, I was inundated with questions and comments about the NDA and the legality of the forum.

Not being one who is up for pushing the boundaries in a situation like this, I really didn’t want to go this route, however, I opted to close the forum until the NDA is lifted.
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It’s been a long time coming, and we are ready to roll! The iPhone Developer Forums are now online. We have created a rather lengthy list of categories to cover as much ground as possible:

• iPhone SDK (data, UI, audio/video, graphics, etc)
• Tools (Xcode and Interface Builder)
• Objective-C

It’s a little quiet right now as we just opened the gates, so, no better time than now to ask a question!

I’d like to thank my friend Paul Codding for his help as well as his interest in moderating the forums along with me. We are both looking forward to building an active iPhone developer community.

In the previous post I used conditional compilation to enable and disable debugging messages, yet I didn’t take the time (for those new to C/Objective-C) to explain how everything worked.

There are three ways to control compilation, the options are as follows:

#if constant-expression
#ifdef identifier
#ifndef identifier

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In the previous post I demonstrated a simple debug class that I wrote to wrap some additional code around NSLog. The code allows for displaying additional information beyond the date/time stamp and process ID that NSLog outputs, specifically, the filename which calls the debug routine, and the line number where the call was invoked. I also added a few additional configuration options including an option to disable all debug messages.

The figure below shows the debug routine called from within two separate source files. Notice the filename and line number references:
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Coming from a C development background, long before the days of integrated debuggers, printf() was the primary tool for tracking down bugs. Building on that, NSLog is no doubt helpful. However, as the amount of code in a project grows, I often find that another reference point in the output would be helpful, namely, the filename and line number where the NSLog calls originate.

This is a two part series on creating a new class that wraps NSLog to add several additional debugging features including output of the filename/path, line number information and the option to turn debug messages off/on.
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In building a recent project I encountered an error during the linking process. I want to point out the error message and show you how this simple error can be resolved. The reason for pointing out this error is that I have no idea why this error came about…more on that in a moment.

Start by looking at the figure below:
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