Rating:  - Wow
This is THE place to start learning to program for OSX. Other books are more comprehensive, and deal w/ the GUI interface integration, and they are important too. However, if you want to learn how to program for the Mac, don't get a C book, just get this one. Then you will be ready to learn from other "Cocoa" books. I am just beginning to teach myself Cocoa (and programming in general), and I was pretty lost w/ the whole thing until I got this book. I can't reiterate it enough-- This is THE place to start for the novice programmer interested in programming Cocoa.
As far as the book itself goes. It is very well written, examples are clear, and the author does not assume you've mastered a concept simply because he mentioned it in a previous chapter (a problem w/ many of the other intro books out there). The pacing seems appropriate, and the examples are clear. Another reviewer mentioned the bit operation section as being difficult, and I also didn't really get it myself. However, the good news is that you don't use these operations in Cocoa except in very rare circumstances, so as a novice, you can just ignore that stuff. If you bought any of the other intro to Cocoa books and gave up, buy this, and you'll be able to understand the others better.
Rating: - Adding to the dogpile - this is where to start if you want to learn ObjC or Cocoa
Here was my post to the cocoa-dev mailing list (slightly updated as it's a year old):
FROM : Steven Harms
DATE : Thu Jul 29 01:03:34 2004
...[W]e are both in the early stages of learning Cocoa and would like to apply our experiences in other languages to make learning Cocoa easy.
Part of the heuristic of 'how to learn' starts with an editor, a
compiler, and "here is how you declare a variable" - we then move toconditionals, loops, objects etc. Without that education I felt very naked in the O'Reilly books.
I read the first 15 chapters or so of Stephen Kochan's _Programming in Objective-C_ by SAMS press. I am now going through Hillegass' book and am very pleased (outside of the mail i sent moments ago!).
Kochan's book gives enough familiarity in the basics to demystify a lot of the Cocoa work -- Hillegass does a very good job in building up the basics. I would recommend this path to the absolute beginner.
Steven
....
I stand by this post in a very serious way. I really love ObjC just for itself. I'm thinking about teaching my girlfriend how to program, and I'm definitely thinking about using Objective C because it is regular, sensible, modular, OO, and a lot of fun.
It's amazing just how cool ObjC is. It's really quite too bad that most of the Cocoa books (which is why you're really looking at this book, isn't it?) just kinda slap things around loosley with respect to nailing down the essentials of the Objective C language.
I guess they figure they've got to get us to Interface Builder quickly or else our TV-eroded sense of instant gratification kicks in and turns their book into a doorstop (if that's the case, do you /really/ have any business being a programmer?)
In any case, the only ORA press book that does anything considerable with the ObjC foundation is Davidson's book but then the example is fairly trivial (a CD database) and some of the fundamental primitives of the programming language are not even broached.
This foundation is where Kochan excels. Contrary to other reviewers I love that he teaches from a text editor + compiler approach. I think that the Xtools that apple provides makes writing Cocoa a bit *too* easy. As a result I don't really understand what I'm doing. Much like a child who has learned a series of signs and expressions and can utter them, the mental clay has not been marked with the meaning of those symbols.
If you want to learn Cocoa, I still say put away XTools and ORA press (as good as they are at most other things). Start with Kochan, (vim|emacs), and gcc and get your basics down. From there you'll have an excellent foundation and won't be confused / irritated / baffled by "unexplained magic" that appears in other cocoa books.
Rating: - Great Introduction!
Without teaching optional APIs, Kochan gently guides the reader into Objective-C. The best part? There is no prior C programming knowledge required. Well written, fairly well edited, this is a great introduction to Objective-C. I highly recommend this book.
Rating: - Great intro to OOP and Obj-C
Chapter 3, “Classes, Objects, and Methods,” pretty much cleared up all the confusion I've ever had about object oriented programming. I can’t believe how simple it is to understand once I got over the mental hurdle of object-class-inheritance-method OOP stuff. Actually, it quite reminds me of something one of my ECE 264 instructors tried to teach: separating the interface from the implementation. In this case we were building a library of functions to deal with complex numbers. In OOP parlance, we would have defined a ComplexNumber class, defined its methods, and implemented the methods available to the class.Anyhowways, if you're new to programming and interested in developing for Mac OS X, I highly recommend picking it up. It doesn't cover all the GUI stuff, but it will give you a very good foundation of the underlying concepts of OOP and excellent coding tips.
Rating: - A Very Clear, Understandable Guide
I am a Visual Basic developer by trade but I switched to using a Mac at home a while ago. As a programmer I wanted to start writing applications for my Mac and I wanted to use Apple's own development tools. However, having no knowledge of C or C++ seemed to be a major stumbling block since most Objective-C or Cocoa books assume existing knowledge. Stephen is gracious enough to write his book for those of use who do not and his book is all the better for it. The chapters are presented in manageable blocks so that it is easy to sit down and work through an entire chapter without being shut away for hours and hours and everything is clearly laid out and explained in enough detail to be informative whilst not dumbing everything down excessively.
My only gripe, which is not really Stephen's fault, is that I think that I will also need a dedicated Cocoa book to take things further but, as a guide to Objective-C I really cannot recommend this book highly enough.
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