Books about Cocoa programming

COCOA Programming for MacOS X by Aaron Hillegass
ISBN: 0321213149

Suitable for anyone with a little C++ programming experience who wants to create software for the newest Mac platform, Cocoa Programming for Max OS X provides a slickly packaged and approachable tutorial that will get you started creating state-of-the-art Mac programs.

The smart presentation style and easy-to-understand code examples help make this text an excellent resource. It also helps that Hillegass is a truly engaging writer. He first explains how legacy NeXTSTEP platform has evolved into Cocoa on the Mac OS X. Starting with short examples illustrating the actual Cocoa tools in action, the author gets you started with simple programs for a random number generator, a raise calculator and other comprehensible examples. Rather than just listing APIs and classes, the emphasis is on hands-on Cocoa development. An early standout section provides a nice tour of essential Objective-C features you'll need to learn to use Cocoa effectively.

This book covers the several dozen built-in Cocoa controls, from basic text and buttons to more advanced widgets (including lists and tables). Subsequent sections look at user interface design (using the Interface Builder to create nib files) and how to add programmatic processing behind the visual layout. Along the way, the author introduces coverage of essential Cocoa APIs for strings, arrays and dictionaries. Later chapters look at saving and loading documents (and user defaults) and how to tap the powerful graphics abilities available in Cocoa. (Besides image and basic drawing, there are short sections on PDF support and printing.)

More advanced user interface features get their due by the end of the book, including cutting and pasting data through the Cocoa pasteboard and also adding drag-and-drop support. Final sections look at creating new controls for use with the Interface Builder palette, and, briefly, how to use Java with Cocoa (an option that the author doesn't necessarily recommend). Throughout this text, the author provides more advanced, challenging problems at the end of each chapter for the "more curious" reader. This approach helps that beginners will not get lost in the details of Cocoa development, but will give the more advanced reader something more to do.

Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish, Eric M. Buck, Donald A. Yacktman
ISBN: 0672322307

Cocoa Programming provides intermediate and advanced programmers with the knowledge and techniques to produce powerful full-featured Cocoa applications. Cocoa Programming communicates the wisdom and design experience of three top-notch veteran Cocoa developers and includes technical information and insights that are not available from any other source.

Cocoa is Apple's powerful and mature object oriented development technology for creating Mac OS X applications quickly and efficiently. Apple recommends that all new applications written for Mac OS X use Cocoa. Cocoa is a collection of software objects that implement almost all features common to Mac OS X applications. Programmers extend the Cocoa objects to provide application-specific features. The Cocoa objects are reused in every Cocoa application so that programmers can concentrate on adding unique value with each line of code rather than constantly reimplementing common features or struggling to access operating system services. Significant applications can be built with very little code.

Cocoa is distinguished from other object-oriented development environments in several ways: Cocoa is mature, consistent, and broad. Cocoa is based on a cross-platform specification and has evolved from a cross-platform implementation. Cocoa is extraordinarily extensible, flexible, and dynamic in part because of Objective-C, the language used to implement it. This comprehensive book covers virtually every aspect of Cocoa application development from the tools used to build programs to sophisticated multi-media and low level implementation details. Topics ranging from client-server networking to game development are covered. Examples that can be used directly in application code and a companion Web site provide a treasure chest of reusable objects that illustrate the best practices developed through years of use.