Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition)

Additional Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition) Information

“Aaron’s book is the gold standard for Mac OS X programming books—beautifully written, and thoughtfully sculpted. The best book on Leopard development.”

—Scott Stevenson, www.theocacao.com

“This is the first book I’d recommend for anyone wanting to learn Cocoa from scratch. Aaron’s one of the few (perhaps only) full-time professional Cocoa instructors, and his teaching experience shows in the book.”

—Tim Burks, software developer and creator of the Nu programming language, www.programming.nu

“If you’re a UNIX or Windows developer who picked up a Mac OS X machine recently in hopes of developing new apps or porting your apps to Mac users, this book should be strongly considered as one of your essential reference and training tomes.”

—Kevin H. Spencer, Apple Certified Technical Coordinator

If you’re developing applications for Mac OS X, Cocoa® Programming for Mac® OS X, Third Edition, is the book you’ve been waiting to get your hands on. If you’re new to the Mac environment, it’s probably the book you’ve been told to read first. Covering the bulk of what you need to know to develop full-featured applications for OS X, written in an engaging tutorial style, and thoroughly class-tested to assure clarity and accuracy, it is an invaluable resource for any Mac programmer.

Specifically, Aaron Hillegass introduces the three most commonly used Mac developer tools: Xcode, Interface Builder, and Instruments. He also covers the Objective-C language and the major design patterns of Cocoa. Aaron illustrates his explanations with exemplary code, written in the idioms of the Cocoa community, to show you how Mac programs should be written. After reading this book, you will know enough to understand and utilize Apple’s online documentation for your own unique needs. And you will know enough to write your own stylish code.

Updated for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5, this revised edition includes coverage of Xcode 3, Objective-C 2, Core Data, the garbage collector, and CoreAnimation.

What Customers Say About Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition):

The author writes in somewhat of a conversational style, as opposed to a highly technical and analytical fashion. 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. I haven't finished it yet but I'm loving this book. This was my first time learning a computer language from a book. 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. 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've had minor experience with Java, and pretty extensive experience with C/C++ and that was plenty of preparation for me.

For me that helps a lot because some concepts are hard to grasp for the first time.I'm extremely satisfied with this book. It's extremely easy to read and follow along without getting lost. 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. 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. For this book, I'd recommend having a basic understanding of object oriented languages. I did research before I bought it and I think it paid off. I thought that was be pretty neat seeing as Aaron is a bit of a celebrity in the Mac community :)

Now am experienced Mac OS X Developer, but anyway I bought this book and read it, again it's excellent written, a lot of examples, different aspects of Cocoa Framework. My backgrounds of Mac OS X programming was from the 2nd edition of this book. I want to thank Aaron Hillegass for his work done so wonderful. This book is an excellent starter to mid-level for Cocoa developers. The third edition added some new technologies introduced in Mac OS X 10.5 like CoreAnimation and garbage collector, anyway I expected to see in this edition more info about Core Data (which is used more and more even in simple apps) and deeply explaining the more complicated things like NSArrayController and NSTreeArrayController with more examples and techniques.Also it would be great to see in the next editions a chapter about Network Programming with Cocoa, CoreAudio services and another on Threading Programming in Cocoa.For those interested in Cocoa programming, I would recommend also the "Cocoa Programming" book by Scott Anguish, Erik Buck and Donald Yacktman (Hope they will release a new edition rewritten with all new technologies and new techniques Objective-C 2.0 introduced)

I bought this book coz I would like to learn up on cocoa. Searching on the web I read that this is the most referenced book by programmers on MAC® OS X.I hope that my tiny review could help you guys.

Not a good introduction book. People were saying this is a good introduction book for beginning developers for the Mac Platform. AT ALL. This book assumes you know Objective-C. But be aware it is not n00b friendly AT ALL. No explanations are offered for examples.

I would prefer a more structured set of challenges (easy, medium, hard, etc). I bought this book to learn Cocoa and Objective-C (I'm an experienced C++ programmer), and it was extremely helpful. so that you know what you're getting yourself into before you start. Working through all of the projects in the book was an excellent start and helped me understand the structure of Cocoa and the basic design paradigms of an Objective-C program. My main objection to the book relates to the "Challenge" sections at the end of many of the chapters: the difficulty of these challenges varies widely, and there are too few of them. Some of the challenges take only a few seconds, while others can take over a half hour. The book's example codes were also sometimes confusing, having you type in references to objects that you haven't yet created and that haven't been mentioned in the text (I sometimes thought perhaps I had skipped a page, etc).Pros:* Well-structured to lead you through the course* Very well suited for self-study* Excellent projects for teaching basic conceptsCons:* "Challenge" problems vary too much in difficulty, too few of them* Odd order of inputting some of the project code