Chapter 1. Introduction to Cocoa

Cocoa is an extensive library of reusable software components used for building applications that run on Mac OS X. You can think of Cocoa as a large set of application building blocks that you can use "off the shelf" or adapt for your specific needs. This chapter gives you a high-level overview of those building blocks, shows you how they are organized, and explains the features they provide.

Cocoa poses a learning curve for newcomers, but once you learn to use it, application development will suddenly seem far easier and more fun. Because the Cocoa frameworks give you so much fundamental application functionality "for free," you can spend your time and creative energy building new technology, not reinventing the wheel.