The Cocoa Cookbook

I am new to Cocoa & Mac OS X Development. This book is one of the fastest/easiest ways to get a Cocoa feeling. I really enjoyed this book. By following this book, you will develop a real Cocoa application. All steps are clearly documented (what/how/where etc). This book is not written for experienced Cocoa developers. For this people, this book would be probably to easy ('I know this already').

This is an excellent programming cook book. Armed with this book and some conceptual background, the world of Cocoa Programming is open to you. This book is not suitable for people who have never programmed before, but you don't need a computer science degree to use it either. The individual recipes are each valuable and explain both the "hows" and "whys" of common Cocoa programming techniques. The book has a "learn by doing" philosophy. The recipes in this book are the best and most comprehensive tutorials available for Cocoa programming, but they are long. Plan to spend several hours working on each recipe. Once mastered, you will be able to modify and reuse each recipe to develop countless applications. This book will give you a sense of how the pieces of Cocoa fit together so that you will be able to more easily approach new programming topics.

Anyone serious about learning Cocoa should consider adding Cocoa Recipes to their reference arsenal. I have found it to be a valuable source of information that extends the essential Cocoa books authored by Hillegasse, and Anguish et al. Cocoa Recipes discusses in depth a number of areas not discussed extensively in other titles. I found the discussion on formatters very useful. Also, Cocoa Recipes provides an additional perspective in relation to core cocoa programming tasks. Best of all, it provides many practical, easy to adopt code examples. If you are serious about learning Cocoa, you will get something out of this book. Cocoa Recipes is best read after you have read one or two of the Cocoa books mentioned above. It will help round out your knowledge and will become a valuable reference source.

Cocoa Recipes for Mac OS X is a great guide for anyone interested in writing applications for MAC OS X. It is chocked full of USEFUL real-life programming examples. Each chapter successively builds upon the last to churn out and refine a true to the bone Mac OS X application. Nearly everything you'd like to learn how to accomplish with the Cocoa Framework is here. Lots of code examples show you how to implement tabbed views, menus, drawers and a whole slew of other user-controls. One outstanding feature this book provides (and should be standard in every programming book) is a Table of Topics. This table immediately follows the table of contents and provides an alphabetical list of controls, objects, and major classes from the Cocoa Framework and where in the book to find examples on coding these items. This feature is great. If you've ever thumbed through a programming book in frustration looking for an example on how to program some obscure function that you recall reading once... --you'll understand just how useful a Table of Topics is!