macOS Cocoa: Programming for OS X 2nd Edition

It's definitely still relevant, and includes a small section on Cocoa Bindings, which is very important. AFAIK the main thing it's missing is a discussion of CoreData, but I don't know of any current books that include that, only online information. 95%+ of this book is still relevant and I think it's still the best general introduction to Cocoa.

I've gone through about half of the book. It gives a good foundation in Cocoa, and will get you to where you feel comfortable enough to start writing some simple applications. However, there's also a fair amount of stuff that it doesn't really cover that you have to learn from the documentation and other online sources. For example, it doesn't cover NSToolbar which is pretty important for most Cocoa applications. The things it does cover are mostly more fundamental so you do get a base upon which to build your knowledge.

My copy gets here tomorrow (Monday) I think, otherwise Tuesday, so I'm going to read it and try it out. I went through a tutorial that Apple has for how to make a currency converter. I'll be way surprised if Apple's changed Cocoa that much to where that book has lots of irrelevant information. I mean it was printed when Panther was the OS.

Oh and the comment on lots of the online documentation, there is a huge, vast, large amount of documentation for everything with Apple's SDK's. I looked through some of it and heck if you printed that thing out, it'd be well over 1000 pages long.

Use online documentation when possible, read the books for a strong foundation, and ask questions, this forum is pretty good for help.

mduser63 said:

For example, it doesn't cover NSToolbar which is pretty important for most Cocoa applications.

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Well...maybe and maybe not depending on what you're coding. I have never personally used NSToolbar just because I tend to hate toolbars. But yeah, that would be good information to include in a book. It's too bad Cocoa Programming by Anguish et al. never got updated, that was a great Cocoa reference and even included a toolbar discussion. However, it was written I believe covering 10.2 Jaguar and much of it is sorely out of date now (for example it deals with Project Builder, not even Xcode). I do still find myself digging into it from time to time though.

HiRez said:

Well...maybe and maybe not depending on what you're coding. I have never personally used NSToolbar just because I tend to hate toolbars. But yeah, that would be good information to include in a book. It's too bad Cocoa Programming by Anguish et al. never got updated, that was a great Cocoa reference and even included a toolbar discussion. However, it was written I believe covering 10.2 Jaguar and much of it is sorely out of date now (for example it deals with Project Builder, not even Xcode). I do still find myself digging into it from time to time though.

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Programming in Objective-C by Steve Kochan is a good Obj-C book, some parts aren't covered like Multi-threading, dates, etc. but the author is a good author. + on his site http://www.kochanwood.com/ or is it http://www.kochan-wood.com/ (I think its the latter) he puts information about pages in the books like if its incorrect or something is missing, etc.

robbieflu said:

I was going to ask about the Objective C book but you've saved me the time.

Thank you all for your invaluable time and help!

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The Aaron Hillegass book does teach you some things about Objective-C but in indepth like Steve Kochan does. The Cocoa Programming 2nd Edition by Aaron Hillegass is awesome, its so simple I even read through Chapter 1. It's simple, easy to follow, good challenges.

I'm on page 85 (I skipped chapter 3) and its just an amazing book.

slooksterPSV said:

Programming in Objective-C by Steve Kochan is a good Obj-C book, some parts aren't covered like Multi-threading, dates, etc.

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For more 'hardcore' stuff then this book is pretty cool. True, you won't use it all the time but when you do it's indispensible

caveman_uk said:

For more 'hardcore' stuff then this book is pretty cool. True, you won't use it all the time but when you do it's indispensible

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I may purchase that later on down the road.

BTW an update on the book, the challenges are fun and all the information you need is either given in that chapter or in the chapters back behind. I've had troubles with two of the exercises (one I figured out, and the one, when I found the solution online, felt like an idiot because I didn't review some of the material to finish the exercise). It's the best book I've read. The examples are awesome! Be lucky you have OS X 10.4 if you do, there is sooooooo much already embedded that allows you to make apps quicker and more elegant.

Good luck, I recommend this book for anyone who is serious about developing applications.

EDIT: As an update on all of this. Everything in programming with Objective-C and Cocoa makes sense, it all connects together so perfectly. I just read about how NSDocumentController works and how it creates new documents (well it's a figure, but you can read it like a book). And basically, the NSMutableArray can hold objects right? So instead of creating new instances (think of Windows for those terms) of an application, you just create another object of MyDocument in the NSMutableArray, when one of the Windows in the NSMutableArray is killed, it removes it from the stack. So you are storing objects in NSMutableArray. It's so awesome, I can't believe I never programmed on a mac before this.