Customer Reviews
Not as scary as I thought. - By: Mrs. A. C. Penny, 09 Jul 2008 
I've had a project on the back burner for some time that required me to get to grips with Cocoa: no ifs, no buts. My timing wasn't ideal as XCode had gone from version 2 to version 3 without the documentation being updated, so I've been gingerly playing with Cocoa for about 5 months, but not reallly getting very far owing to the hurdles presented by the many interface changes.
Starting this book was nothing less than a revelation. I'm up to p77 of 418 pages & am surprised how quickly I'm getting to grips with tricky objective-c syntax (although it's reallly not too bad once you stop being scared of square brackets) & working with Interface Builder. The trickiest subject is memory management, & I must say I was rocking backwards & forwards gibbering 'this is hard, I'm not stupid' & clutching tightly to my degree certificate as Aaron recommends, but even this rather murky subject is beginning to sink in.
His writing style is very fluent & his many years of experience teaching people this technology is evident from the content. I'd shy away from saying this is a book for beginners, but if you've got a smattering of programming experience (PHP & a spot of Ruby is my background) & want to write good programs for the Rolls Royces of home computing, then this book has got to be at the top of your shopping list (assuming you've already bought a Mac that is! ).
Beware Xcode3 is here! - By: Mr. A. J. Trimbee, 08 Jul 2008 
I've just bought the 2nd edition of this book (yellow cover) to save money. It seems to be a good book - clear & well laid out... BUT THERES A PROBLEM...
To use this book, you download Xcode3 tool from Apple.com (easy & free)
The 2nd Edition of the this book (Yellow cover) relates to Xcode2 & is badly out of date.. its not possible to follow the picture instructions since one of the key applications (interface builder) has completely changed.
So I would strongly advise to buy the 3rd Edition (grey/green cover)... even though its a packet more expensive... I guess this is the cost of evolution!
Unless of course you would like to buy my 2nd edition.. which I now can't use?? :D
The perfect starting point for learning Cocoa/Obj-C - By: S. M. Metcalfe, 14 Jun 2008 As someone who made the switch to Macs/OS X just over 18-months ago, my interest in how the OS worked led me to buying this book. It's probably the best computer book I've bought full-stop.
This is THE BOOK you need to buy for a first-class authoritative introduction to Cocoa, the programming environment for OS X.
Very good - By: A. R. Capon, 05 Jan 2008 This is a very good book for a foundation in cocoa.
The author knows his stuff & history of the subject & writes in an easy to understand way.
Far better than the ADC book.
One note of warning is that Apple changed Interface Builder in XCode 3 so alll the examples need slight re-working if you are going to be using XCode 3. This is a bit confusing to begin with but once you work out what you need to do differently it is not a problem.
Excellent Start to Mac OS X Programming - By: M. Hutton, 29 Sep 2007 This is an excellent book that covers the basics to Cocoa programming, showing you how to make a basic Cocoa program & get going. Although I quickly got the hang of the basics of Cocoa I still use it heavily as a reference along with Apples official Cocoa documentation. As has been mentioned it was written for Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) but is still totallly compatible with Tiger (10.4). The only major thing the book does fail to cover is Core Data which was released with Tiger, but Apple has an excellent tutorial for that which is completely compatible with this book.
