Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 2nd Edition

by James Duncan Davidson, Apple Inc.

Learning Cocoa with Objective-C is the "must-have" book for people who want to develop applications for Mac OS X, and is the only book approved and reviewed by Apple engineers. Based on the Jaguar release of Mac OS X 10.2, this edition of Learning Cocoa includes examples that use the Address Book and Universal Access APIs. Also included is a handy quick reference card, charting Cocoa's Foundation and AppKit frameworks, along with an Appendix that includes a listing of resources essential to any Cocoa developer--beginning or advanced.Completely revised and updated, this 2nd edition begins with some simple examples to familiarize you with the basic elements of Cocoa programming as well Apple's Developer Tools, including Project Builder and Interface Builder.After introducing you to Project Builder and Interface Builder, it brings you quickly up to speed on the concepts of object-oriented programming with Objective-C, the language of choice for building Cocoa applications. From there, each chapter presents a different sample program for you to build, with easy to follow, step-by-step instructions to teach you the fundamentals of Cocoa programming. The techniques you will learn in each chapter lay the foundation for more advanced techniques and concepts presented in later chapters.You'll learn how Each chapter ends with a series of Examples, challenging you to test your newly-learned skills by tweaking the application you've just built, or to go back to an earlier example and add to it some new functionality. Solutions are provided in the Appendix, but you're encouraged to learn by trying.Extensive programming experience is not required to complete the examples in the book, though experience with the C programming language will be helpful. If you are familiar with an object-oriented programming language such as Java or Smalltalk, you will rapidly come up to speed with the Objective-C language. Otherwise, basic object-oriented and language concepts are covered where needed.

Genres: Programming, Technology, Computers

358 pages, Paperback

First published September 20, 2002

Reviews

[Mark Miller · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got this as an e-book, because Borders was going out of business, and I needed to use up a gift card. The edition I got was written for OS X Tiger, and I was using Leopard at the time. Many of the examples still worked as described in the book, though in several instances I needed to do some research on the directions it gave for using XCode, since the options had changed. I couldn't get one of the last examples to work as described.

It was a nice book for "kicking the tires" in Cocoa, giving you an idea of what you can do in it, and how easy it can be to get some cool things going, but I didn't get a sense afterwards that I really knew how to write an OS X app. competently. I think its intent was to cover the gamut of Cocoa's features in text, graphics, and UI controls, giving you some examples of what it can do, but it was not comprehensive in helping you gain a sense of mastery over the framework. I also didn't feel like I knew the Objective C language that well afterward, since the book's presentation gave me just enough of the language to run Cocoa apps. This was my introduction to Objective C. I would not recommend it for that. You don't have to know the language to use this book, as it gets you familiar with some basics, but it moved so quickly on that, I didn't get a good sense of the language's features. I read "Programming in Objective C," by Stephen Kochan (I also wrote a review of that book on Goodreads) to get a better sense of the language.

[Lyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little dated now, but it was a good introduction to Mac programming.

[Tammy Labu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nice book

[Rafael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice an quick intro for all cocoa components and their Mac counterparts .