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Learning Cocoa
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Author: Troy Mott
List Price: $34.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: B00007FYJ6
Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates (June, 2001)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 1,334,480
Average Customer Rating: 2.89 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 2 out of 5
Bad Dog!
Dull, dull, dull. Quite literally this is a bunch of documentation you can download from Apple's site bound in a book. Yes, you do learn something, but the ratio of useful information to "type in the program" is awful and it's very dry reading.Try the Aaron Hillegass book, or the new O'Reilly "Building Cocoa Applications" if you want a useful title on programming Cocoa. I see there's a second edition of this book due in September 2002 - hopefully this'll either pep up the existing content, or add something more (published paper documentation for the Cocoa frameworks is non-existent, probably because some of the on-line documentation I've looked at still has big gaping holes in it - and people wonder why Carbonized apps outnumber those that use Cocoa...)
Rating: 2 out of 5
Almost useless
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.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Useful, I suppose
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.
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