Programming in Objective-C

New Mac computers come with a full suite of excellent objective-c programming tools called Xcode. This book is a great way for inexperienced programmers to learn ObjC without feeling overwhelmed. When I first decided I wanted to take up programming for the Mac, I was concerned that I would feel overwhelmed with arcane terminlogy and confusing explanations. I was very gratified to start into this book with no programming experience other than old school apple //c Basic and be able to write simple programs right from the start. That instills a sense of confidence that I think is essential to success in learning. The author makes sure that you understand what each line of code is for and you never feel like you're typing something that you don't understand. I purchased this book as a bundle with "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" by Aaron Hillegass. I actually cracked that book first and successfully programmed my first example program. However in chapter 3 he writes "..this chapter assumes that you already know a little C and something about objects..". Since I have no C experience at all and only know about objects as "things", I put that book down and started with "Programming in Objective-C." I'm glad I did. This book focuses more on learning objective-C and touches only a little bit on how to use Xcode. Once I get further along I'm sure that the Hillegass book will be an excellent book for me to learn from. If you're looking for 2 books to get you started in programming Objective-C, I would highly recommend the 2 book bundle.

Here was my post to the cocoa-dev mailing list (slightly updated as it's a year old): FROM : Steven Harms DATE : Thu Jul 29 01:03:34 2004 ...[W]e are both in the early stages of learning Cocoa and would like to apply our experiences in other languages to make learning Cocoa easy. Part of the heuristic of 'how to learn' starts with an editor, a compiler, and "here is how you declare a variable" - we then move toconditionals, loops, objects etc. Without that education I felt very naked in the O'Reilly books. I read the first 15 chapters or so of Stephen Kochan's _Programming in Objective-C_ by SAMS press. I am now going through Hillegass' book and am very pleased (outside of the mail i sent moments ago!). Kochan's book gives enough familiarity in the basics to demystify a lot of the Cocoa work -- Hillegass does a very good job in building up the basics. I would recommend this path to the absolute beginner. Steven .... I stand by this post in a very serious way. I really love ObjC just for itself. I'm thinking about teaching my girlfriend how to program, and I'm definitely thinking about using Objective C because it is regular, sensible, modular, OO, and a lot of fun. It's amazing just how cool ObjC is. It's really quite too bad that most of the Cocoa books (which is why you're really looking at this book, isn't it?) just kinda slap things around loosley with respect to nailing down the essentials of the Objective C language. I guess they figure they've got to get us to Interface Builder quickly or else our TV-eroded sense of instant gratification kicks in and turns their book into a doorstop (if that's the case, do you /really/ have any business being a programmer?) In any case, the only ORA press book that does anything considerable with the ObjC foundation is Davidson's book but then the example is fairly trivial (a CD database) and some of the fundamental primitives of the programming language are not even broached. This foundation is where Kochan excels. Contrary to other reviewers I love that he teaches from a text editor + compiler approach. I think that the Xtools that apple provides makes writing Cocoa a bit *too* easy. As a result I don't really understand what I'm doing. Much like a child who has learned a series of signs and expressions and can utter them, the mental clay has not been marked with the meaning of those symbols. If you want to learn Cocoa, I still say put away XTools and ORA press (as good as they are at most other things). Start with Kochan, (vim|emacs), and gcc and get your basics down. From there you'll have an excellent foundation and won't be confused / irritated / baffled by "unexplained magic" that appears in other cocoa books.

I am a Visual Basic developer by trade but I switched to using a Mac at home a while ago. As a programmer I wanted to start writing applications for my Mac and I wanted to use Apple's own development tools. However, having no knowledge of C or C++ seemed to be a major stumbling block since most Objective-C or Cocoa books assume existing knowledge. Stephen is gracious enough to write his book for those of use who do not and his book is all the better for it. The chapters are presented in manageable blocks so that it is easy to sit down and work through an entire chapter without being shut away for hours and hours and everything is clearly laid out and explained in enough detail to be informative whilst not dumbing everything down excessively. My only gripe, which is not really Stephen's fault, is that I think that I will also need a dedicated Cocoa book to take things further but, as a guide to Objective-C I really cannot recommend this book highly enough.

This book is the most lucid book on programming I have ever read. Having a little (self-taught) experience in C, this book was recommended to me as a good foundation before trying to learn Cocoa for programming on Max OS X. I fully expected to be confronted with the sort of doorstopper that I would never finish, as has been the case with several C++ books; instead, I found a straightforward, uncluttered guide, written by somebody with a genuine talent for teaching. The author takes the approach of not trying to teach you C first, and this has two advantages: first, if you have no C experience, you get started immediately learning Objective-C, so you don't get taught one thing only to be told to forget it later; second, if you do have some C experience, you are thrown into object-oriented programming right from the start. The explanations are consistently concise but clear, and I found myself getting through a chapter or two every night after work and feeling that I was learning something significant on every page. I read someone describe it elsewhere as "Teach Yourself Objective-C in 21 Days," except that this book really could live up to such a title. I wholeheartedly agree - it took me only three weeks to work through the whole book, including nearly all of the exercises. If, like me, you have seen terms such as "polymorphism", "inheritance", "instance method" and "subclassing" bandied around only to stare at them in mute incomprehension, this book is a revelation. The author introduces all such major concepts very gently - in fact they seem to creep up on you, so that by the time you are presented with the proper terminology you either already know what it means or find yourself exclaiming - as I did - "Oh, so that's all polymorphism is!" My only gripe - and it is very minor - is that the explanations of bitwise operators and bitfields are near incomprehensible to anybody who doesn't have a programming background (or rather, they are explained well, but there is no indication of when you would ever use them), and the author does occasionally (though rarely) seem to assume that the reader has a solid maths background (when there are those of us out there from humanities and arts backgrounds who want to learn to program, too). These topics take up little more than several paragraphs of the 500 or so pages, though, so if you're a novice, don't let them daunt you as they are the exception rather than the rule. One thing I appreciated about this book was that full code is provided for 99% of the examples - you are never left with an example that won't compile because the author assumed you could guess the rest yourself. Moreover, whilst the examples and exercises do develop on code from previous chapters - in particular, you will develop a Calculator, Fraction, and Rectangle class in the first part of the book, and AddressCard and AddressBook classes in the second part - the author wisely avoids the build-one-big-program approach that some

Finally!!!Finally a book that teaches how to write Objective-C programs without knowing C or having to learn Cocoa. I've been waiting for a book like this for a long time. Kochan explains all of the concepts of Objective-C and OOP so clearly using lots of examples. The second part of the book, which covers the Foundation Framework justifies the price of the book alone. I particularly liked the chapter on memory management, which clearly explains the autorelease pool and how it works. This book is a must read for anyone who wants to learn how to write programs in Objective-C, even if you already know C. Now I'm ready to learn how to write Cocoa programs!