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

If you want to learn Cocoa this is the book to have. Recently updated for Leopard and the new Xcode tools, the book has been refined over the years as the basis of the Big Nerd Ranch courses. It is progressive, easy to follow and comprehensive. I've purchased most all of the available books on Cocoa and have also purchased each successive Edition of this book. I highly recommend this book and the accompanying classes at the Big Nerd Ranch.

Mark Lucas
Prinicipal Scientist
RadiantBlue Technologies Inc.

I have all 3 versions of Hillegass' book, and this is the best by far. It has been fully updated to cover XCode 3 and Objective-C 2.0. It also contains introductory material for libraries like Core Data & Core Animation. As well as new material, the old content has been edited and the focus seems even better than previous versions.

While the coverage isn't very deep on any topic, it is the only book available that is current with Cocoa and is therefore the best option for getting up to speed on Mac OS X development.

I'm only a couple chapters in, but I just wanted to point out that the book is already obsolete; Interface Builder has apparently been changed a bit in that when you add a connector from an NSObject (i.e. a Button) to a custom object (i.e. programmatic code), the book says to Control-Drag the NSObject to the custom object and then select a method from the resulting pop-up panel. Well, there is no resulting pop-up panel. In the current (latest) XCode, all of the connectors are made going the other way from the custom object's outlets list. In the same way as you would drag the custom object's outlet to a text field, you can now just drag the custom object's method to an NSObject as the "event handler". It's a lot more consistent this way, but it's different from what's in the book, and it had me stumped for several minutes until I figured it out just by clicking and dragging things. I noticed flipping ahead and peeking at what's to come later in the book that this connector thing occurs repeatedly, so be wary.

That said, I'm having a fun time with this book and with discovering Mac OS X coding using this book as a tutorial. I'm quickly reminded of what it was like to learn Visual Basic -- Objective-C is nothing like Visual Basic, but, assuming prior knowledge of C (pointers, etc), the process of getting started with Xcode and Cocoa is about as easy, and frankly I'm quite surprised.

On the other hand, I'm also disappointed by how dependent Cocoa seems to be upon visual designers and drag-and-drop even for code bindings ("connectors"). Once I complete the book, I'll be curious to discover the feasibility of dynamically generating UI layouts programmatically; designing UI layouts using mouse-driven drag-and-drop of connectors doesn't feel natural to me, I'm used to writing event handlers in C# in code. Somehow it feels like I'm not a coder when I drag-and-drop.

But I'm still brand new to OS X coding and even Visual Studio has optional drag-and-drop coding support, it's still too soon to weigh in.

I'm enjoying the book, though, and it's certainly true to its promises--it uses the idioms of the Cocoa community indeed, although sometimes I keep muttering, "oh, so that's sorta kinda like _____ in .NET, okay. A little bit weird in the approach but same function, got it." I wish the author pointed this stuff out just a bit more but I manage.

The book is highly recommended so far. :) I'll update this review once I get closer to completing it.

Concise, well organized, accurate, and beautifully written. An absolute joy to read. THE book for Cocoa programming.

This is the book I have been waiting for!

I am a recent convert to Macs. Ever since I fell in love with my Mac (now two Macs actually), I have yearning to do some experimental application development on it. I should also add that I have extensive programming experience on Windows.

Anyway, I downloaded Xcode, went to numerous websites, saw YouTube video all to try and understand how to create apps for the Mac. Yes, I was able to create an application with some buttons on it that updated a text box. But anything beyond that just didn't make any sense.

Then I ordered this book. I had to wait a couple months as it hadn't been released yet. But boy, was it worth the wait. I got so into the book, I ended up doing a semi-cursory pass of the entire book in about 2 hours. Then I went through the chapters again, reading chapters in-depth and experimented with the code side-by-side. I am happy to say - I finally get it. There are still questions I have, but I feel that I have a much better shot of finding answers in Apple's documentation as well as the numerous Cocoa-related websites.

Note that while the book does teach you the basics of Objective-C, it's not meant to be a complete reference. But between what I read in the book, Wikipedia and Apple's excellent introduction to Objective-C 2.0 PDF, you should be all set.

To summarize, just order this book if you are new to the world of Mac programming but still don't "get it". You will be glad you did.