The practical guide everyone says you need!

"The most comprehensive guide to developing Cocoa available. For the developer new to Cocoa, it provides an excellent introduction that will lead to success with the world's best object-oriented development tools. For those familiar with Cocoa, the excellent organization and presentation make the book invaluable as a reference tool."

--Bill Bumgarner, Cofounder, CodeFab

With the arrival of Mac OS X, Apple now has a modern operating system that calls for advanced programming capability. To take full advantage of the exciting and innovative features of OS X, Apple recommends a development framework known as Cocoa. Cocoa is a powerful collection of object-oriented tools and libraries that makes developing applications a much faster process. Mastery of Cocoa is absolutely essential for anyone doing serious development work for the Macintosh.

"Mac OS X and Cocoa are going to revolutionize the world of software development in the coming years... Aaron Hillegass's book is without a doubt the best aid to learning this technology."

--Erik J. Barzeski, Editor, CocoaDevCentral.com

New technologies often have a steep learning curve and do not always come with complete instructions on how to get started or how to overcome common obstacles. Enter Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X, which shows you precisely how to put Cocoa to work.

"Reading this book is the absolute best way to learn how to harness the power of this amazing technology."

--Andrew Stone, President, Stone Design, www.stone.com

Guiding programmers through the key features of Cocoa, this book emphasizes design patterns that enable you to predict the behavior of classes you have never used before. Using a tutorial format, it takes you, step-by-step, through five applications and an InterfaceBuilder palette. Each project introduces several new ideas, and as each concept or technique is discussed, the author, drawing on his own extensive experience, shows you the advantages of working with Cocoa in object-oriented software development environments.

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Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 102 Ratings

Misleading Title - 2009-07-08
Reviewer Rating:
Like many people, I bought this book as it has garnered much critical acclaim. Here is a quote from the back cover. "Covering the bulk of what you need to know to develop full featured applications for OS X, ........ it is an invaluable resource for any Mac programmer". One more quote from the Preface. "But it does cover probably 80% of what you need to know. You can find the remaining 20%, the 20% that is unique to you, in Apple's online documentation".
I would submit that these quotes are misleading and best. What this book should be titled, or subtitled is "A companion tutorial to Apple's online documentation", as you spend or will spend, if you are a novice, about 80% of your time going through the documentation, to find out, as another reviewer put it, what Hillegass is talking about. I would also take issue with the "covers 80% of what you need to know". If he means by this that he mentions 80% of what is in Cocoa, perhaps he is correct. But in order to understand comprehensively the 80% he talks about **very superficially**, you once again have to dive into the documentation.
Now having said that, if the book was presented as such, I would be far more inclined to give it a higher rating as it does at least let you know what is available.
I am sure Hillegass is a very nice person, but he should have faith that just as many would buy his book if the book was presented as such.

Great beginner/intermediate learner book - 2009-08-28
Reviewer Rating:
Really excellent book and has been recommended by numerous friends. I'm a 10+ year windows programmer, but decided to buy one of these fruit products and learn how to write and iPhone app. It's probably not the best for learning Objective C, but for learning how to code for the Apple or iPhone - this is really the best book I have found for getting started with Apple API's. Pick up a good book on Objective C, and then this one - your library will be complete for getting you going. If you need way more in-depth and complicated features of the OS, this might be a little too beginner, but it's great for beginners and will proudly occupy a good spot on my shelf.

Written by a guy from Big Nerd Ranch, I've gone to Big Nerd Ranch training seminars before - and their top-notch.

Fantastic intro to Cocoa and Objective-C - 2009-11-03
Reviewer Rating:
This is the book I started with to get into iPhone development. Even though this book is specific to Mac OS X desktop software development, it's by far the best book to get a solid foundation in Cocoa and Objective-C before learning the specifics in the iPhone SDK.

It took me about 80 hours to get through this book, doing all of the example programs. After that, it felt like I had taken a 5 credit course in college. This will teach you Xcode, Interface Builder, Cocoa, and Objective-C. Almost all the people at my last company that got into iPhone development said that this is *the* book to start with to get started, and I agree. Hillegass actually teaches a Cocoa class, and you can tell he is a great teacher from reading the book. You'll feel like you accomplished something cool after each chapter.

Before starting with the book, I already knew several other languages in-depth, notably Java, Perl, and some C. It may be a little too advanced for those without solid programming experience, and Objective-C looks very foreign to those who haven't used it before, but it's really not once you get used to it.

Phenomenal Book - 2009-08-31
Reviewer Rating:
This book is remarkable. I love how the author conveys how a Cocoa programmer would talk about or think about a code sample. You can tell the author has taught many students and knows what they need to hear in order to learn the point at hand. I'm a Ruby & Java programmer diving into Objective C, Cocoa, and iPhone programming. Great writing style, good pace, love it.

Fantastic book! - 2009-06-14
Reviewer Rating:
I haven't finished it yet but I'm loving this book. It's extremely easy to read and follow along without getting lost. The author writes in somewhat of a conversational style, as opposed to a highly technical and analytical fashion. In the interest of concentrating on 1 idea/topic at a time he often will say something like "this idea is known as ________, but it's not important right now and we'll read about it in Chapter __". I think this is a good thing; trying to learn a concept and then branching off onto smaller tangents would make it hard to learn the language.

This was my first time learning a computer language from a book. For this book, I'd recommend having a basic understanding of object oriented languages. I've had minor experience with Java, and pretty extensive experience with C/C++ and that was plenty of preparation for me. A lot of concepts with Objective-C (used in Cocoa) are extremely similar to those seen in C/C++, but with different syntax and keywords. Because of this, Aaron will often teach concepts in Objective-C and relate the functionality to Java or C/C++ concepts in order to solidify his explanation. For me that helps a lot because some concepts are hard to grasp for the first time.

I'm extremely satisfied with this book. I did research before I bought it and I think it paid off. Fun fact-- I've got a friend that works at Apple and he was attending WWDC '09, and he saw Aaron Hillegass cruising around the convention in his cowboy hat. I thought that was be pretty neat seeing as Aaron is a bit of a celebrity in the Mac community :)

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