Learning Cocoa with Objective-C: Developing for the Mac and iOS App Stores Book Review

This book is a nice concise no nonsense introduction to Objective-C. This book is different than most of the Objective-C books I have read in that it uses Cocoa and Cocoa Touch to teach the language. The books starts out covering the developer programs, Xcode, Object-Oriented Programming with Objective C, and the Foundation library. It then has a chapter on the contents of iOS and OS X applications and how they are each packaged. This is a must read chapter for those coming from a Windows background. The book continues to cover a ton of topics. I have listed the chapters included in the book below to show you the topics covered. 1. Cocoa Development Tools 2. Object-Oriented Programming with Objective-C 3. Foundation 4. Applications on OS X and iOS 5. Graphical User Interfaces 6. Blocks and Operation Quotes 7. Drawing Graphics in Views 8. Audio and Video 9. Model Objects and Data Storage 10. Cocoa Bindings 11. Table Views and Collection Views 12. Document-Based Applications 13. Networking 14. Working with the Real World 15. Event Kit 16. Instruments and the Debugger 17. Sharing and Notifications 18. Nonstandard Apps 19. Working with Text 20. iCloud You may be wondering what the heck Operation Quotes are that are covered in chapter 6. That should have been Operation Queues. One of the main things I like about this book is that the topics are short and also very informative. There are not 10 samples and scenarios to show you the ins and outs of the topic at hand, the author just provides an example and a short explanation which is enough. This style of covering topics does require that you be an experienced programmer. An experienced programmer coming from the Java or .NET world should do fine with this style of teaching. The short chapters make the book a very easy cover to cover read. The pace at which topics change is nice. The short chapters also makes this book an ideal reference for learning a lot about a topic in a short amount of time. I would recommend reading the first 6 chapters in order, but then after that the chapters stand alone. The code is organized into one workspace which makes it very easy to use. It also works as is and is very usable. Over all I highly recommend this book to any experienced developer coming from the Java or .NET world. If you have no programming experience you may want to spend some time learning C first.

Learning Cocoa with Objective-C: Developing for the Mac and iOS App Stores