Rating:  - Great book to get started with Objective-C
This book was a great help in learning the Objective-C language. It focuses on the language and touches on sme specific areas of Cocoa. A vetran C++ programmer, I found this book to be a quick way to come up to speed on Objective-C.
The organization is well thought out and clearly written. It would be a great book for a someone who has never programmed in C and for vetrans wishing to learn a new language. The book is easy to read and organized in a manner that makes it quite useful as a reference after reading it.
Rating:  - Avoid if (1) you know C, or (2) you want something thoughtful!
In general, this gets high marks from most reviewers, but I did not like it. I think the reason is that I have been a fairly competent C programmer for many years. So half the book was telling me things I already knew (what is a++ etc). Even worse, the other half had an elementary viewpoint. It was intended to help you rote learn mindlessly.
As I read about the language features I did not know, many obvious questions occurred (Why on earth would anyone use this apparently kludgy and inefficient NSNumber class? How does init differ from a C++ constructor?). But there was no intelligent discussion of such issues, you were left to figure it out for yourself.
There were also too many minor typos in the code examples.
Rating:  - DONOT get the EBook!
It is has the worst thing that can ever happen to you in you life! It is riddled with DRM errors, Adobe does not support it or people donot have a clue about how to deal with ebooks. Stay away from it as plague!
Rating: - Same as it ever was...
I learned C using Mr. Kochans' "Programming in C" book and I left yet another glowing review under that one a year ago. This one is not quite as easy to follow, but the concepts themselves aren't as easy as C was, so I can't fault the author. If I had not read his Objective-C book before starting into the Hillegass book, I would have been MUCH more frustrated trying to understand Cocoa. In the beginning of the Hillegass book he had me clicking and dragging stuff in the Interface Builder, doing his best to explain the concepts to me (somewhat unsuccessfully). Then, when he has you look at the actual code that was generated by all of the clicking-and-dragging, the proverbial light bulb came on... I said to myself "Stephen explained all of this in his book".
Reading just the first half of this book will help you understand ANY Cocoa book better.
Rating: - Excellent book for aspring programmers with no C experience
New Mac computers come with a full suite of excellent objective-c programming tools called Xcode. This book is a great way for inexperienced programmers to learn ObjC without feeling overwhelmed. When I first decided I wanted to take up programming for the Mac, I was concerned that I would feel overwhelmed with arcane terminlogy and confusing explanations. I was very gratified to start into this book with no programming experience other than old school apple //c Basic and be able to write simple programs right from the start. That instills a sense of confidence that I think is essential to success in learning. The author makes sure that you understand what each line of code is for and you never feel like you're typing something that you don't understand.
I purchased this book as a bundle with "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" by Aaron Hillegass. I actually cracked that book first and successfully programmed my first example program. However in chapter 3 he writes "..this chapter assumes that you already know a little C and something about objects..". Since I have no C experience at all and only know about objects as "things", I put that book down and started with "Programming in Objective-C." I'm glad I did. This book focuses more on learning objective-C and touches only a little bit on how to use Xcode. Once I get further along I'm sure that the Hillegass book will be an excellent book for me to learn from.
If you're looking for 2 books to get you started in programming Objective-C, I would highly recommend the 2 book bundle.
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