The much anticipated release of the third edition of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass from Big Nerd Ranch is just around the corner for release.

If your like me, you buy every coding book under the sun and have a bookshelf of tech books right at your finger tips. Funnily enough I have a copy of the 2nd Edition but never spent much time actually using it partly from not having enough time and not long after purchasing the book I moved from Tiger to Leopard which became a problem because of the new version of Xcode and other changes.

Well I’ve started reading the third edition from the start, and the third edition from a beginners perspective is great. The examples are easy to follow and reading the code samples and instructions on how and why they work just makes sense.  You will however find it much easier if you know another language as Cocoa applications are programmed using the Objective C language.

This new book covers all the latest features of programming in Cocoa including Xcode 3, Objective-C 2, core data, the garbage collector, and core animation. If your interesting in starting application development for the Mac, then this is the book for you

Ubuntu has just released the latest version and according to founder Mark Shuttleworth, the best release of Ubuntu yet. My BenQ laptop has been running Ubuntu 7.04 and I’ve always done a fresh install with each release. This time I didn’t want to do that so I went with the built in upgrade in the update manager. Unfortunately I didn’t have any success on my first attempt at the upgrade an error during the upgrade related to not accessing files in the repository correctly. Not sure if this is a common issue of just something to do with my machine.

Although Linux has a huge following for the diehard linux user, I personally don’t know anyone who uses it for a day to day operating system. I love the Linux movement and look forward to when Linux is truly a desktop ready operating system for anyone other than advanced users. I know there are going to be people who say I’m wrong, however I’m only basing my opinion on my own experiences and of those people I know.

Until that day, my MacBook Pro is my best friend.

Recently I’ve been delving into customising both Wordpress and Drupal and although I’d consider myself still a beginner, I still think it’s worth writing about problems I’ve encountered so others learning Wordpress & Drupal customisation, can do it without the same frustrations.

So today I’m going to talk about how I needed to include a post category on a post page. A client required each post to have a header above the post with the posts category name nicely styled with CSS above the post. After a read though the Wordpress documentation and some experimentation, I ended up with the the_category tag and what I thought would be the solution to my problem.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t entirely correct as the_category tag causes the category name to be a link text as well which wasn’t what I wanted. So I dugg around the Wordpress docs and forums to try to find how this could be done. It wasn’t long before I found others looking for the same solution and responded to their own problem post with… ‘it’s ok, I’ve worked it out’. That’s right… they didn’t put how they solved the problem which is why I couldn’t resist writing about this. So here is the solution…

<?php
foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) {
echo $category->cat_name . ' ';
}
?>