[.ca] Learning Cocoa with Objective C (ISBN 0596003013)

A good book, but not the best book:
A very popular book, and greatly improved in its second edition. Very example and tutorial oriented; somewhat out of date at this point, however. Helps the user learn Interface Builder, ProjectBuilder and Objective-C, too. Possibly a bit shallow to get the reader writing their own Cocoa programs from scratch, but a good introduction. Ultimately, probably not as recommended for a first purchase as Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish or Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass.

Super Introduction:
When I started this book, I had no knowlege of Cocoa (aside from the first version, which stank(stunk?)), or any programming besides Applescript. This book seemed to know that, and didn't pretend that I had been a programmer for five years. The book got me familiar to Cocoa in probably the best way, and it's short, allowing me to find my next source of info. In short, whether you've programmed before (you probably want to have done some Applescript or BASIC first, though) or are a novice, this can get you started with a very powerful, easy language. it was kinda fun, too. I am not an adult.

Lacks detail:
I thought the examples throughout the chapters and follow-up exercises were good. However, the author's explanations leave much to be desired. I'm very experienced at object oriented programming languages, yet there are passages within this book that make little sense to me. Basically, I felt as if the author sacrificed completeness for brevity. This is pretty much what other reviewers have said. I wish I would have heeded their warnings prior to buying this book. My advice is to pass on this book for something better.

Indispensible Guide for Moving from C to Object Orientation:
Being an old Pascal and C programer from the earlier Mac OS (systems 6 and 7) I was finding 1) that Carbon documentation was a mess, and 2) that Cocoa's object orientation was incomprehensible. So, in deciding which environment to work in to upgrade my old scientific apps, I felt stuck between two impossible choices. I wanted the power of quartz and the familiarity of C in a format I could learn. This book provides the indispensible introduction to object orientation that is a prerequisite for Cocoa and ultimately Apple's latest and greatest stuff under the hood. From there, the developer documentation and Garfinkel's or Hillegrass' books can take you the rest of the way. But, this is the place to start if you're conversant in c but not objects.

Good try, but needs a bit more work:
This book needed one more pass by the proofreaders. There are an annoyingly large number of typographical errors and other mistakes. What surprised me is that after introducing a number of features of Interface Builder, the author tends to manually write code (e.g., outlet declarations) then load the results into Interface Builder to make the various object connections. It would have been better in my view to simply use Interface Builder to perform these tasks (certainly less error prone). Overall, the book is helpful in explaining a lot of issues, but I would have like the book to touch more in internationalization issues, such as how to handle input method editors and product localization. In real world programing, I'll need internationalization and input method editor handling before I need to worry about speech synthesis.