Cocoa™ is one of the principal application environments for Mac® OS X. Among Cocoa's many attributes, its advanced object-oriented APIs allow you to develop in both Java and Objective-C. This revolutionary new way of developing sophisticated applications for the Macintosh is both powerful and easy. With Learning Cocoa you'll become familiar with Cocoa application development, using Objective C, not merely by reading, but by doing. The book begins with a discussion of essential object-oriented programming concepts for those with no previous experience. It proceeds through an introduction to the Cocoa environment, development, tools, and some simple tutorials to help you become familiar with the basic elements of Cocoa programming. The remaining tutorials guide you as you create a series of increasingly complex example applications. The techniques and concepts you learn in one tutorial lay the foundation for the more advanced techniques and concepts in the next. You don't need extensive programming experience to complete the examples in this book, though it would be helpful to have some experience with the C programming language. The code for each example is included in the text so you can simply type it in. If you're already familiar with an object-oriented programming language like Java or Smalltalk, you'll quickly feel right at home with Objective-C, the language used throughout this book. As you ease your way into the experience of Cocoa programming, you're encouraged to play, to explore, to "kick the tires." You'll finish this book much better prepared to take on serious application development with Cocoa, and you'll find Apple's development environment not only less mysterious, but one that you'll be eager to program in. Written by insiders at Apple Computer, the book brings you information that you can't get anywhere else--and a potential leg up in the Mac OS X application development market.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 21 Ratings

Almost useless - 2002-05-31
Reviewer Rating:
The first few chapters are useful for learning the basics of Cocoa, but the last half of the book was written with the mistaken philosophy that people learn to code best by typing in lots of huge examples with almost no explanation.

If you want to learn Objective-C and Cocoa (and you already know C), go to Vervante and get "The Objective-C Programming Language" (a print-on-demand book by Apple). Once you've finished with that, you might want to go through the first half of this book - but get a used copy if you can. Or borrow one!

The best book out so far is Aaron Hillegass' "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X". While it doesn't cover every topic in great depth, it is sufficient to get you started.

From there, stick to Apple's free documentation (included with the developer tools) and searches of the cocoa-dev mailing list (hosted by Apple). Don't bother with O'Reilly's "Building Cocoa Applications," unless you have time and money to burn.

Maybe some good Cocoa books will come out later this year, but for now Aaron's and the Vervante/print-on-demand one are about it.

returned my copy - 2002-01-14
Reviewer Rating:
I am surprised O'REILLY published such a weak book. To keep it short, it is one of those "click here, click there, you are done!" kind of books. I doesn't go much deeper than the Cocoa tutorials on Apple's developer site.

Bad Dog! - 2002-07-28
Reviewer Rating:
Dull, dull, dull. Quite literally this is a bunch of documentation you can download from Apple's site bound in a book. Yes, you do learn something, but the ratio of useful information to "type in the program" is awful and it's very dry reading.

Try the Aaron Hillegass book, or the new O'Reilly "Building Cocoa Applications" if you want a useful title on programming Cocoa. I see there's a second edition of this book due in September 2002 - hopefully this'll either pep up the existing content, or add something more (published paper documentation for the Cocoa frameworks is non-existent, probably because some of the on-line documentation I've looked at still has big gaping holes in it - and people wonder why Carbonized apps outnumber those that use Cocoa...)

Useful, I suppose - 2002-05-01
Reviewer Rating:
The Interface Builder (which helps assemble the GUI for a Cocoa application) has changed a bit since this book was written. The palettes have been rearranged, and some of the interface elements are different. For example, the book directs one to click on the "electrical outlet" icon next to the class name. There is no longer such an icon in current versions of IB. Fortunately in all cases where the book no longer matches the tools it has been fairly easy to figure out what to do.
Learning Cocoa is still usable, but is becoming dated.

A must have - 2007-10-09
Reviewer Rating:
This book is filled with little hints and tips and condensed with great material. It reminds me of the Kernighan and Richie's book for C. There's something to learn in each single paragraph.

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