Customer Reviews

Learning Cocoa

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I am surprised O'REILLY published such a weak book. To keep it short, it is one of those "click here, click there, you are done!" kind of books. I doesn't go much deeper than the Cocoa tutorials on Apple's developer site.

The first few chapters are useful for learning the basics of Cocoa, but the last half of the book was written with the mistaken philosophy that people learn to code best by typing in lots of huge examples with almost no explanation.

If you want to learn Objective-C and Cocoa (and you already know C), go to Vervante and get "The Objective-C Programming Language" (a print-on-demand book by Apple). Once you've finished with that, you might want to go through the first half of this book - but get a used copy if you can. Or borrow one!

The best book out so far is Aaron Hillegass' "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X". While it doesn't cover every topic in great depth, it is sufficient to get you started.

From there, stick to Apple's free documentation (included with the developer tools) and searches of the cocoa-dev mailing list (hosted by Apple). Don't bother with O'Reilly's "Building Cocoa Applications," unless you have time and money to burn.

Maybe some good Cocoa books will come out later this year, but for now Aaron's and the Vervante/print-on-demand one are about it.

Excellent. This book has just the right doses of tips and tricks, distilled wisdom of the NextStep way, "best practice" Objective-C concepts, solid examples and brevity. If you have been scouring the Cocoa online APIs, stepwise.com, omni lists, etc., but wishing for more then this book with deliver for you. The diagrams and screen shots are first rate, as is the editing. Examples are very easy to follow. My only complaint is I wish there were sections on printing, threading, services, and other Cocoa topics. Of course they can't cover all the APIs. Hopefully some of these will appear in an "advanced" Cocoa book from O'Reilly.

I know right off the bat that this book is a beginner book as are all "learning" series from Oreiley. I'm an experienced programmer with prior experience in NeXTSTEP. So, judging from a beginner's point of view, the "object-oriented programming" chapter is very clear and concise, right to the point. The "Objective-C primer" chapter might need a little bit more work. For a C/C++/Java programmer, it should be easy to read, but it lacks some essential information on some of the syntax.

From an experienced programmer's point of view, this book is too basic although it does give you a good introduction on how to use the tools.

The whole book is pretty much a tutorial. Personally, I think the step-by-step instruction is just way too much. The instructions are usually duplicated in a lot of chapters. You figure that the author should have omitted the basic instructions in the later chapters, but he doesn't.

Anyhow, this is still a good book for beginner. I'd like to see "Programming in Cocoa" come out soon though...

Chris

I bought Learning Cocoa because I assumed, being written by Apple and published by O'Reilly, that it had to be good. Unfortunately, I was rather disappointed.

The book begins with a fairly weak introduction to Objective-C and Cocoa, and then launches into telling you what lines to pound in to Project Builder and what buttons to click in Interface Builder in order to compile programs that Apple has written. While these "tutorials" provide no real room for guided independent development, they do have some worth for learning good Cocoa development procedures and for getting in to the habit of writing Cocoa code.

All in all, Learning Cocoa didn't advance my knowledge very far, and I don't see myself counting on it as a reference at any point in the future. I'd stay away from this one unless you're a Cocoa book collector or something odd like that.

Basically a rehash of the documentation that is available on the OS X Developer CD and Apple's web site. Frankly, I think it's shameful that Apple is, on the one hand, chastising developers for not embracing X, while, on the other, failing to document the X development environment. Learning Cocoa covers just the basics while leaving the most intriguing and potentially useful aspects of the environment unexplained. That shouldn't be a surprise, I suppose, since the most popular phrase in the current collection of developer documentation is "Description forthcoming." Sheesh.

This book will give you a great introduction to Cocoa but don't expect to walk away with a mastery of the topic. The folks at Apple have taken their many on-line examples and documentaiton and essentially wrapped it in a pretty and more edited format (less errors than on-line version).

There's almost nothing in this book that you can not find on-line, but this book does a great job at organizing. I was a bit bummed that the high quality found in other O'Reilley books was not present here, but in general I like the idea of collaboration between Apple and O'Reilley. In another time, in another place this book would have been the standard documentation that came along with the Developer Tools but in this age when we download everything maybe that can't be expected.

In bottom line, this is a well edited, well put together book. It will teach you Project Builder and many aspects of developing with Cocoa. However, it's only an introduction.

This book is a fantastic introduction to the world of programming in Apple's OSX native language, objective-C, and the Cocoa frameworks.

It is not a beginners programing guide in that you need to have command of C programing, an understanding of object oriented programing and frameworks, and to a lesser extent some knowledge of the Unix tool concepts (although you can get by with out this for a while). It is very helpful if you have experience with makefiles and the GNU cc, linker and GDB.

That said, I think that a beginners can write quite astounding programs in a short time with just the book and the knowledge of C programming and data structures.

My experience was that this book was an easy read BUT I have about 20 years of C programing (more in other languages) and extensive experience with Think C and code warrior and their frameworks. I am very competent in Unix programming.

One reviewer complained that most of the book can be found on-line. This is partly true but you have to look in a lot of places to find it AND the flow and introduction of subjects makes reading the book that much easier. You will need this material in any case since it presents the meat to support this books intro. You'll find the material on the Developement cd or on apples website

http://developer.apple.com/macosx/

I give this book two thumps up and a must have for anyone new to Cocoa programming.

Richard Rosenlev

The Interface Builder (which helps assemble the GUI for a Cocoa application) has changed a bit since this book was written. The palettes have been rearranged, and some of the interface elements are different. For example, the book directs one to click on the "electrical outlet" icon next to the class name. There is no longer such an icon in current versions of IB. Fortunately in all cases where the book no longer matches the tools it has been fairly easy to figure out what to do.
Learning Cocoa is still usable, but is becoming dated.

This book is filled with little hints and tips and condensed with great material. It reminds me of the Kernighan and Richie's book for C. There's something to learn in each single paragraph.