Learning Cocoa with Objective C

Being an old Pascal and C programer from the earlier Mac OS (systems 6 and 7) I was finding 1) that Carbon documentation was a mess, and 2) that Cocoa's object orientation was incomprehensible. So, in deciding which environment to work in to upgrade my old scientific apps, I felt stuck between two impossible choices. I wanted the power of quartz and the familiarity of C in a format I could learn. This book provides the indispensible introduction to object orientation that is a prerequisite for Cocoa and ultimately Apple's latest and greatest stuff under the hood. From there, the developer documentation and Garfinkel's or Hillegrass' books can take you the rest of the way. But, this is the place to start if you're conversant in c but not objects.

This book is very good. It is much, much better than the first edition. It is very well written and easy to read. The examples are clear and their appear to be no major mistakes at all. The book does an effective job of introducing the reader to the major points of Cocoa programming. It gives you enough information to start writing simple programs by yourself. I believe this book is excellent preparation for the more advanced Cocoa books.

Learning Cocoa with Objective-C presents a clear series of short examples that demonstrate many key aspects of Cocoa. The writing style is direct, and free from distracting stories or other fluff. I first purchased Hillegass' book, but started to become flustered with some of the examples which implemented concepts that had yet to be explained.I then purchased Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish which gave me great insight into the Cocoa concepts. After reading about half of Anguish's book I returned to the Hillegass book to get me hands dirty with some of the tutorials again, but I just couldn't get into the style of the book.I then picked up Learning Cocoa and found great relief in the clean format of the book. While the topics discussed aren't explored to a great depth, I feel that such brevity is appropriate for a tutorial book. Davidson does a good job of keeping the examples short and to the point (shaving literally pages off the Currency Converter example which is also presented in Apples docs).My recommendation would be to buy this book as a tutorial and buy Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish for reference and deeper exploration.

I have both this book (Learning Cocoa with Objective-C) and it's predecessor (Learning Cocoa). These are two completely different books. The first book wasn't hardly worth the paper it was printed on, as it was mostly just a thrown together collection of rag-tag tutorials from Apple's web site. Thankfully, this book is NOT the first book!Fast forward to verison II, Learning Cocoa w/ Objective C. This book is great! It covers a whole slew of topics ommitted by the first version. Thankfully the content is NOT the same as before. A tiny bit of it is similar, but for the most part one person took it upon themselves to make sure that all of the material was presented in a consistent manner. By the end of this book you'll walk through all of the steps required to write an application similar to TextEdit (provided with Mac OS X). This application will support Rich Text Formatting, save and open capabilities, spell checking and much much more. You'll be impressed with what you build in this "Learning" book. If you've ever done the REALBasic tutorial you'll find that this creates a very similar application using the Cocoa Framework and Objective-C.All the basics of learning to write MAC OS X applications with Cocoa are covered here. Unlike the first version of this book it doesn't assume you already knew Objective-C or have had exposure to NextStep. If you're looking for a good book to expose you to Cocoa and Objective-C programming buy this book and work through it all. It's worth it! This book will also guide you through using the debugger in Project Builder. You'll learn how to use the debugger print-object command and other useful debugging techniques. This book does more than just point out the fact that the debugger exists. It shows you how to apply it usefully.Another thing I like about this book is the fact that it covers NSString's in more detail than other books of the genre. You'll see examples on how to pull substrings out of NSStrings and use NSRange. You'll also see demonstartions of using NSMutableString as well. Several other books merely mention that NSMutableString exists, but then fail to show what is different between the two.The excersises at the end of each chapter are very helpful in learning Cocoa Programming too! They're not too difficult, but not too simple either. They'll make you dig and think a bit to find a solution, but not so much that you'll want to pull your hair out and give up. AND If you go happen to get stuck you'll find answers revealed in the back of the book.This book is for the most part geared towards Mac OS X 10.2, but I did manage to do all of the examples in 10.1.5 (except with the programming example that made use of the Jaguar's Address Book, of course.) This is a bonus, for some of the earlier Cocoa Programming books do not take into account newer versions of Mac OS X and thus are now a bit out of date.Surprisingly, this book is thicker too, but only because it's now on quality paper

This is a note I sent to the author:I've spent the last year hopping bewtween intro C and cocoa books. When yours came out I almost didn't buy it, fearing yet another bout ofconfusion. Thankfully, I made the purchase. I'm halfway through and confident I will not only finish but actually walk away with skills. Thanksfor remembering the beginner as well as your clear examples that provie detailed analysis each step of the way. If only all programming tombs were so well written.