Rating:  - A soild introduction to Obj-C
This book was a very good introduction to the Objective-C programming language. Before I bought this book I did have some programming experience in PHP and Perl, but I did not feel like such experience was needed in reading the book. More importantly, it did not matter that I had no previous C or C++ experience. It is important to note that this book does not really cover making applications for Mac OS X in depth. In addition to purchasing this book I also purchased "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" by Aaron Hillegass, which did a much better job of covering the specific aspects of making Cocoa applications.
Rating:  - Quick and straightforward reading
This book condenses all basic stuffs about C programming and the Objective-C extension. It is kind of introductory material about these two languages and may be read in two or three hours by the experienced programmer interested most in Objective C.
Rating:  - A good book, but only for a few select people
This book is well written and easy to follow. It is a great book if you fit into one of the following categories.
Programming novice (From a novice review: Chapter 3, Classes, Objects, and Methods, pretty much cleared up all the confusion I've ever had about object oriented programming.")
Crusty veteran C developer (From a crusty review: "A vetran[sic] C++ programmer, I found this book to be a quick way to come up to speed on Objective-C")
Experienced, but clueless programmer (Clueless review: instead of learning procedures, as you would with C\C++, you learn about objects and how to use those objects in a productive way.)
If you are an experienced OO developer in a language other than Objective-C, you will quickly become frustrated with the pace and tedium of this book. I do not fault the author in this respect. He wrote a good book that applies to a majority of the possible readership.
The author also positions this book as a book for those without prior knowledge of C.
" Readers can also learn the concepts of object-oriented programming without having to first learn all of the intricacies of the underlying procedural language (C)."
However, he is doing you, and your future coworkers a great disservice by maintaining this fantasy. Without prior knowledge of C, you will probably be a pretty awful Objective-C developer.
Rating: - Wow!
Coming from a PHP background, this book was a perfect and thorough introduction to Objective-C. This is a great book for starters, and especially for people who are coming from a background in a non object-oriented language. After reading this book, I feel confident enough to write a fairly complex and powerful program that takes advantage of Objective-C and NextStep features (for the command line - you'll need to learn Cocoa for GUIs). In addition, there is a handy appendix that recommends a few invaluable books that will bring you further to becoming a full-fledged Cocoa programmer.
As a recommendation to all who would like to learn C-type languages (or any programming language) - you may first want to learn about the way in which computers store data (bits, bytes, words). Knowing this beforehand has helped me greatly to grasp the concepts of pointers and memory management (independant of any book on C).
Rating: - Great Intro to ObjC and OOP for beginners
I bought this book out of frustration, after trying to work through other introductory books on Objective-C and Java. This book provides straightforward explanations, clear example code, and end of chapter exercises that are not impossibly difficult. The author has even posted the answers to the odd numbered exercises on the book website. Thank you for this!
This book is, hands down, the best introductory Objective-C text I've found. I also own the author's text on C, and find it very useful.
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