Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition)

Honestly, I was quite apprehensive because I'm a newbie to programming, with just a passing knowledge of Objective-C (gained from online resources). However, after going through 80% of the book (and looking forward to the next few chapters), I can say that this is definitely a great resource for any beginner who wants to learn how to write Cocoa programs. At the same time, concepts which I first found difficult to comprehend in Apple's online documentation became much easier to understand after they were discussed in the book.

IMHO, anyone interested to become a Mac developer should read this amazing book + Apple's great online documentation. I guess the only way to improve it would be to include sections on iPhone development for the 4th edition. Thanks for a great book Mr. Hillegass, and for making Cocoa fun to learn! =)

The author is probably the only professional Cocoa instructor, and if not the only, at least the one that's been so the longest. As such, his book is absolutely amazing. The instruction takes you through everything you need to know to start writing your own Cocoa applications. The pace in which he introduces topics is just right. It's structured to make you question things, then he immediately answers any question you might have had. And by the end of the book, you're also taught how to teach yourself anything else you may find yourself needing to know about the Cocoa frameworks. The beginning of the book is also a great crash course in Objective-C, that is, if you already know another OO-language. This gets my highest review, a first for an instructional material.

A great book to get used to mac programming using ObjC and cocoa. A building stone before being thrown in the forums and other dedicated sites (including exhaustive Apple documentation).

Really a great book when you aim to develop applications on the mac platform. Of course this book is not perfect (too short probably, some part should be developped, ...) but remains nonetheless the best book (and the only one updated for MacOS 10.5) on the subject available to date.

I've been programming for over 15 years and I wanted to start programming for both the MacOS and iPhone so I needed a good starting point. I've read a few others books on this subject but I was eagerly awaiting the release of this edition(3rd) for the updated sections on XCode and Objective-C 2.0. Definatly the best book on the subject. If you want to learn mac programming and iphone programming(pretty similar) this book will get you started. The one major thing I didn't like(personally but it might help others) was the fact that the same app was used for the second half of the book, I usually don't like when authors do that because it makes it impossible to jump around the book.

Who this book is for:
- People who understand the fundamentals of programming.
- People who want to start programming on the MacOS or iPhoneOS.
- People with zero or very little experience with Mac programming

Who this book is NOT for:
- People without any programming experience. The book does not explain what an array is or how memory works;both of which are needed if you're going to be a serious programmer. If you want to start programming on the Mac get a 'C' basics book first to get the fundamentals down first.
- People with Mac experience might find this book slow all though it does offer new stuff it's bloated with "Begginer" info.

If you have zero programming experience whatsoever and want to dip your toes in the shallow end of the Cocoa pool then I can see how picking this book up might seem like a watershed experience for you. Aside from that, I'm not sure who its target audience is as there is little congruence between its accolades and its content.

There is nothing, repeat, NOTHING, in here that is not in Apple's free tutorials and documentation. While I too strongly prefer physical objects I can hold and highlight to web pages on a screen, the fact that you get little more than a brief glance at what little material is actually covered will drive you to the electronic docs in the end anyway. What was the point again? Oh, right, Hillegass needs money since he's not really producing marketable software anywhere that I can see.

I was "taught" Cocoa by former NeXT employees much like Mr. Hillegass while doing time at Apple, and while none of them wore goofy looking hats in order to assert their wholly contrived notions of in-your-face individuality, all of the expats I encountered shared some uncannily common traits:

1. They'd never actually used OS X let alone written any commercial software for it, yet there they were telling Mac developers how to do their jobs. I'm sure this has changed since then and at least a few of them have actually had an opportunity to use a Mac once or twice.

2. They don't like learning anything new and will vehemently defend the quality of any random piece of garbage they wrote back in 1988 regardless of how terrible it is.

3. Any time their code is actually proven to be terrible they will fall back on the "fixing it now would be impossible because I'm the only one who really understands it and I don't have time" method of preserving job security.

4. They (not so) secretly think they're better than anyone at Apple who didn't come over on the buyout Mayflower despite the fact that their company and all of its products failed miserably and like to stage numerous petty rebellions against commonly accepted Apple conventions to make sure everybody knows how cool they are.

I won't say that any of the code in here is downright terrible--while it does tend to lack any notion of error handling, very little of it actually DOES anything so how bad can it be?--but I will say that the UIs Hillegass slaps together violate both Apple HIG and common sense in more ways than you could ever want to shake a stick at, making me wonder whether he's still too busy raging against the machine to follow any pesky "rules" or just legally blind. Photos of the man's attire and tattoos have prevented me from completely ruling out the latter, but who knows.

While this level of aesthetic slop might be perfectly excusable in a teenager's blog about TkInter or something, the post-buyout Interface Builder draws all these pretty blue lines on the screen for you so you know when window elements are properly aligned; lines which you really have to go out of your way to ignore. You're not putting on a slideshow for a bunch of guys from a Bangalorean trade school here, you're preparing materials for publication in a book you plan on charging a lot of money for. How about you at least pretend to care for showmanship's sake rather than foster horrendously bad habits amongst those who mysteriously find you worthy of emulation? Writing a lame, overpriced book certainly isn't a crime, but this one in particular can be directly blamed for much of the nonsense that makes every Cocoa-centric mailing list and discussion board completely unreadable due to the manner in which both it and its author are marketed. As such, it annoys me on a near daily basis by proxy.

And as for that exciting all new material in the exciting all new 3rd edition, it's like a really, really bad joke (not to be confused with the numerous other really, really bad jokes which liberally pepper Hillegass' prose [yeah you're no Elaine Boosler there, buddy]). Especially weak is the chapter on CoreAnimation which will teach you nothing more than the fact that there's a class called CALayer that can maybe do some kinda cool stuff if you can manage to think up a slightly less contrived example than the author did after spending what must have been nearly 10 minutes pilfering Apple's documentation (did I mention that it's free yet? Because it is.).

Now I do have to admit that I am truly envious of Mr. Hillegass' ability to schmooze so effectively that lazy people actually believe his watered down version of the information they all have sitting right in front of them is worth its weight in gold. The day he writes a book on exploiting others' weaknesses for profit I'll be the first in line to buy a signed copy because I have absolutely none of these clearly valuable people skills. Until then I would suggest that he focus on taking his final challenge himself and produce a brand new Cocoa application that other people actually use if he wants to be seen as an authority figure on the subject. WebObjects doesn't count.