Book Price Comparisons
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 Great first book on Cocoa This is the book I have been waiting for! I am a recent convert to Macs. Ever since I fell in love with my Mac (now two Macs actually), I have yearning to do some experimental application development on it. I should also add that I have extensive programming experience on Windows. Anyway, I downloaded Xcode, went to numerous websites, saw YouTube video all to try and understand how to create apps for the Mac. Yes, I was able to create an application with some buttons on it that updated a text box. But anything beyond that just didn't make any sense. Then I ordered this book. I had to wait a couple months as it hadn't been released yet. But boy, was it worth the wait. I got so into the book, I ended up doing a semi-cursory pass of the entire book in about 2 hours. Then I went through the chapters again, reading chapters in-depth and experimented with the code side-by-side. I am happy to say - I finally get it. There are still questions I have, but I feel that I have a much better shot of finding answers in Apple's documentation as well as the numerous Cocoa-related websites. Note that while the book does teach you the basics of Objective-C, it's not meant to be a complete reference. But between what I read in the book, Wikipedia and Apple's excellent introduction to Objective-C 2.0 PDF, you should be all set. To summarize, just order this book if you are new to the world of Mac programming but still don't "get it". You will be glad you did.  Not too helpful This book is too high-level and not descriptive enough. Could be a good intro but doesn't really help to do some real-world tasks. Lots of easy to understand but relevant examples I'm new to Cocoa/Objective-C but have a fairly extensive background in software development in a variety of different languages. What I needed to get me started was something that gave a broad overview of the Cocoa Framework and some simple examples of how the Interface Builder and code fit together. This book did a great job of doing this. Unlike "Learning Cocoa with Objective-C" (a book I really struggled with) this book isn't really tutorial based and doesn't try and take you through how to build some big whiz-bang application. It's the sort of book that helps get you started developing your own application and whenever you have a question like "I wonder how to setup a NSTableView delegate" there's a very good chance that there'll be an example of doing just that in the book. After a few days with this book I was confident enough to start my own development, and haven't looked back since.  Excellent for getting on the Cocoa/XCode wagon quickly The author employs an good teaching technique that leads step by step to understanding the workings of Cocoa and XCode. I am familiar with the Object Oriented Programming concept and that helped to understand the material covered. The hands-on exercises cover all the basics and are short and relatively easy. I also like the "tone" employed by the author. It's friendly, supportive and plain English. There is some miss-match between the current version of Cocoa (2.0)/XCode (3.0) and the book, especially where it concerns Interface Builder and the illustrations. But it was fairly easy to figure out. Except for some chapters, like Creating Interface Builder palettes. Overall I highly recommend this book, while I also hope that the author posts some addendum on the internet that shows the book's examples using the current version of the software. | |||||||||||||