Journal · Buying software

Why is this textbook six dollars?

A used copy of the book that taught a generation to build iPhone apps costs six dollars. The publisher still asks $47.99 for the last edition of the same book. The language both of them teach still runs on the phone in your pocket. The distance between those three facts is the most useful thing an owner can understand before signing for a system.

Highland Willow · Boone, North Carolina · 18 October 20262,621 words · about 11 minutes

Someone is selling a copy of Programming in Objective-C, third edition, for six dollars. Free shipping, condition listed as very good, 552 pages, published by Addison-Wesley on 10 June 2011. We looked at the listing on 18 October 2026.

Six dollars across 552 pages is about one cent a page. You could not have it printed for that.

Meanwhile the publisher still sells the sixth edition of the same book, by the same author, as an eBook, for $47.99. Same language, same material brought forward. Roughly 8 times the price of the used copy.

This is not really a post about Objective-C. It is a post about what a price like that measures, because owners read the same signal when they choose business software and a lot of them read it backwards.

What six dollars is measuring

The instinct is to treat the price as a verdict on the technology. Cheap book, dead language. That is not what happened.

What the used market priced is not Objective-C. It is a set of instructions for a version of the tools that nobody opens any more. The third edition teaches Xcode 4. The sixth edition teaches Xcode 5, iOS 7 and Mavericks, and the publisher can still ask $47.99 for it because it is the last one written and therefore the least wrong.

Neither price tells you whether the code still runs. It does.

Six editions in ten years

Look at the distance between the third edition and the fourth: 174 days. No programming language changes meaningfully in 174 days, and Objective-C did not. What changed was Xcode, the application the developer actually sat in front of, and when Xcode changed the book’s screenshots and step-by-step instructions were wrong.

Readers were not really buying a language. They were buying current directions through a toolchain that moved underneath them about once a year, and the shelf life of directions is short.

Carry that into any software decision. Most of what you will pay to keep a system running is not the thing you chose. It is the moving parts around the thing you chose.

The seventh edition never came

The sixth edition shipped on 18 November 2013. Apple announced Swift, the language intended to replace Objective-C, on 2 June 2014, 196 days later. There was never a seventh edition. That was 12.9 years ago.

The peak came after the replacement

Here is the part that should change how you plan.

Objective-C was TIOBE’s Language of the Year in 2011 and again in 2012, the years this book was being revised annually. But its highest position in that index since 2001 was number 3, and it reached that in March 2015, about 286 days after Apple announced its replacement.

The language did not fall when the announcement came. It kept climbing for most of a year, sat near the top for a while, then took a decade to unwind. In October 2026 it is number 25, rated 0.61 percent.

Two clocks

A platform runs two clocks at different speeds, and most bad software decisions come from reading one and acting as though it were the other.

The attention clock is books, courses, conference talks, job adverts, index rankings. It turns fast. It can invert within a year of a single vendor keynote. It is the clock the trade press reports, and it is the one that generates headlines about a language dying.

The installed base clock is the code actually in production, the data inside it, and the people who know where the awkward parts are. It turns over decades. It is almost never reported, because nothing about it is news.

Objective-C is 25th in an index and still compiles, still ships, still sits underneath software that ran on a phone sold this morning. Both clocks are telling the truth. They are describing different things.

The project, in a browser

Chapter 21 of the book builds an iPhone app called Fraction_Calculator. It is the capstone, the thing the previous twenty chapters exist to make possible. To run it as written you need Xcode 4, the iOS SDK of the period, a provisioning profile and a Mac, which is the whole difficulty this piece is about.

That is as far as the original goes for most readers, and we are not going to retype Kochan’s chapter into a commercial website to work around it. The code is his and his publisher’s, and an iPhone app could not run in this page regardless of who owned it.

What nobody owns is the idea of adding one fraction to another. So here is that, written from scratch, running in this page. No toolchain and nothing to install. Key the numerator, press Over, then key the denominator, which is how the book’s version takes input.

That is 67 lines of JavaScript, and the arithmetic inside it is the arithmetic you learned at ten. The book introduces the same object in Chapter 3 and does not reach a working app until Chapter 21, and most of the distance between those two chapters is not about fractions. It is about memory management, retain counts, class interfaces, Interface Builder connections and whichever version of Xcode happened to be current that year.

The idea aged perfectly. The instructions for the machine did not. That is the entire argument of this piece, in one object you can poke at.

Four questions to ask before you sign

The whole arc above, first edition to last, ran about 10 years. Businesses routinely run the same accounting or inventory system for longer. Whatever you adopt will outlive the period in which anyone is excited about it, so the question at purchase is not whether it is current. Everything is current on the day you buy it.

1. Who else can work on this in five years, and what will they charge? Not whether skilled people exist today, but whether there is a pipeline. A technology that has stopped producing teaching material has stopped producing new practitioners, and the ones who remain reprice accordingly.
2. Can I get my data out, in a format somebody else can read, without the vendor’s help? Do not accept the answer. Run the export, open the file, and check whether the relationships survived the trip. A promised export is not an export.
3. What am I actually depending on? The language, the vendor, the hosting, or the shape of the data. Those fail separately. A vendor can go under while your data stays perfectly usable, and a data model can be strange enough that no vendor can save you.
4. What does it cost to leave? Get the number in writing before you sign, while you still have leverage. Afterwards, the number is whatever they say it is.

What this does not prove

A used book price is a thin market. Six dollars is one seller’s price for one copy on one day. ThriftBooks prices in volume and clears inventory, and the figure moves. It is a signal about demand for a 15-year-old edition, not a valuation of anything.

TIOBE measures attention, not deployment. It is assembled from search engine results. A language can fall twenty places while the quantity of it running in production stays flat or grows. We have not counted lines of Objective-C in production, and we are not aware of anyone who has.

We did not say Objective-C is dead. It compiles today. What is supported here is that fewer people are learning it and that its teaching material stopped being revised in 2013. Neither of those is the claim that it stops working.

This is an analogy, not advice about mobile development. Highland Willow builds and runs business systems. We do not do iOS work. The lifecycle pattern transfers; a specific recommendation about Apple platforms would not, and we are not making one.

One date is weaker than the rest. Five of the six publication dates come from Pearson’s own store. The second edition date comes from retail listings and we did not confirm it with the publisher.

Common questions

Sources

1. eBay item 377501095432, "Programming in Objective-C, Third Edition", ThriftBooks, US $6.00, condition Very Good, observed 18 October 2026. https://www.ebay.com/itm/377501095432
2. Internet Archive, "Programming in objective-C", 3rd edition, 2011, scanned from a Boston Public Library donation, 555 scanned pages. Access-restricted-item true, print-disabled collection, no download options. The embedded reader shows the cover only. Checked 18 October 2026. https://archive.org/details/programminginobj00koch
3. Pearson / InformIT, "Programming in Objective-C", 1st edition, published 8 December 2003. Listed as no longer in print. https://www.informit.com/store/programming-in-objective-c-9780672325861
4. Pearson / InformIT, "Programming in Objective-C", 3rd edition, published 10 June 2011. Listed as no longer in print. https://www.informit.com/store/programming-in-objective-c-9780321711397
5. Pearson / InformIT, "Programming in Objective-C", 4th edition, published 1 December 2011. https://www.informit.com/store/programming-in-objective-c-9780132900881
6. Pearson / InformIT, "Programming in Objective-C", 5th edition, published 4 December 2012. https://www.informit.com/store/programming-in-objective-c-9780321887283
7. Pearson / InformIT, "Programming in Objective-C", 6th edition, published 18 November 2013, 552 pages, eBook $47.99. https://www.informit.com/store/programming-in-objective-c-9780133756883
8. TIOBE Index, October 2026. Objective-C at position 25, rating 0.61%. Language of the Year 2011 and 2012. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
9. TIOBE, "The Objective-C Programming Language": highest position since 2001 is #3, March 2015. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/objective-c/
10. Apple, WWDC keynote, San Francisco, 2 June 2014. Swift announced. No hyperlink; cited from the dated keynote itself.