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| Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition) | 
 enlarge | Author: Aaron Hillegass
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Category: Book
List Price: $49.99
Buy New: $21.92
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New (44) Used (8) from $21.92
Avg. Customer Rating:  83 reviews
Sales Rank: 1463
Media: Paperback
Edition: 3
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 7 x 1.4
ISBN: 0321503619
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.268
EAN: 9780321503619
ASIN: 0321503619
Publication Date: May 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Teaching experience shows January 8, 2002
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
I was halfway through the O'Reilly book on this topic, and just stopped when I started the Hillegass book. (And my opinion of O'Reilly books is generally very high.) His experience as a teacher really shows. Each time a question arises in my mind, he answers it in the next paragraph. Perfectly targeted for the experienced programmer who simply doesn't know the Cocoa framework. Pretty hard to improve on this book.
 The Rachael Ray of Mac programming August 1, 2008
11 out of 34 found this review helpful
If you have zero programming experience whatsoever and want to dip your toes in the shallow end of the Cocoa pool then I can see how picking this book up might seem like a watershed experience for you. Aside from that, I'm not sure who its target audience is as there is little congruence between its accolades and its content.
There is nothing, repeat, NOTHING, in here that is not in Apple's free tutorials and documentation. While I too strongly prefer physical objects I can hold and highlight to web pages on a screen, the fact that you get little more than a brief glance at what little material is actually covered will drive you to the electronic docs in the end anyway. What was the point again? Oh, right, Hillegass needs money since he's not really producing marketable software anywhere that I can see.
I was "taught" Cocoa by former NeXT employees much like Mr. Hillegass while doing time at Apple, and while none of them wore goofy looking hats in order to assert their wholly contrived notions of in-your-face individuality, all of the expats I encountered shared some uncannily common traits:
1. They'd never actually used OS X let alone written any commercial software for it, yet there they were telling Mac developers how to do their jobs. I'm sure this has changed since then and at least a few of them have actually had an opportunity to use a Mac once or twice.
2. They don't like learning anything new and will vehemently defend the quality of any random piece of garbage they wrote back in 1988 regardless of how terrible it is.
3. Any time their code is actually proven to be terrible they will fall back on the "fixing it now would be impossible because I'm the only one who really understands it and I don't have time" method of preserving job security.
4. They (not so) secretly think they're better than anyone at Apple who didn't come over on the buyout Mayflower despite the fact that their company and all of its products failed miserably and like to stage numerous petty rebellions against commonly accepted Apple conventions to make sure everybody knows how cool they are.
I won't say that any of the code in here is downright terrible--while it does tend to lack any notion of error handling, very little of it actually DOES anything so how bad can it be?--but I will say that the UIs Hillegass slaps together violate both Apple HIG and common sense in more ways than you could ever want to shake a stick at, making me wonder whether he's still too busy raging against the machine to follow any pesky "rules" or just legally blind. Photos of the man's attire and tattoos have prevented me from completely ruling out the latter, but who knows.
While this level of aesthetic slop might be perfectly excusable in a teenager's blog about TkInter or something, the post-buyout Interface Builder draws all these pretty blue lines on the screen for you so you know when window elements are properly aligned; lines which you really have to go out of your way to ignore. You're not putting on a slideshow for a bunch of guys from a Bangalorean trade school here, you're preparing materials for publication in a book you plan on charging a lot of money for. How about you at least pretend to care for showmanship's sake rather than foster horrendously bad habits amongst those who mysteriously find you worthy of emulation? Writing a lame, overpriced book certainly isn't a crime, but this one in particular can be directly blamed for much of the nonsense that makes every Cocoa-centric mailing list and discussion board completely unreadable due to the manner in which both it and its author are marketed. As such, it annoys me on a near daily basis by proxy.
And as for that exciting all new material in the exciting all new 3rd edition, it's like a really, really bad joke (not to be confused with the numerous other really, really bad jokes which liberally pepper Hillegass' prose [yeah you're no Elaine Boosler there, buddy]). Especially weak is the chapter on CoreAnimation which will teach you nothing more than the fact that there's a class called CALayer that can maybe do some kinda cool stuff if you can manage to think up a slightly less contrived example than the author did after spending what must have been nearly 10 minutes pilfering Apple's documentation (did I mention that it's free yet? Because it is.).
Now I do have to admit that I am truly envious of Mr. Hillegass' ability to schmooze so effectively that lazy people actually believe his watered down version of the information they all have sitting right in front of them is worth its weight in gold. The day he writes a book on exploiting others' weaknesses for profit I'll be the first in line to buy a signed copy because I have absolutely none of these clearly valuable people skills. Until then I would suggest that he focus on taking his final challenge himself and produce a brand new Cocoa application that other people actually use if he wants to be seen as an authority figure on the subject. WebObjects doesn't count.
 Marv January 5, 2002
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Simply the best book for learning OS X Cocoa programing on the market today. Written in a chatty, easy to read style with lots of pictures by a bloke that knows what he's talking about. Much easier to read than "Learning Cocoa" from Apple. Working through the books chapters and accompanying programming challenges you actually learn and understand step-by-step. You will quickly have your own OS X programs up and running based on the examples in the book. A great starting place for new Cocoa programmers. Four stars not five because there are a few errors in the printing that I have - however the BigNerdRanch web site has all corrections online.
Excellent Introduction October 4, 2002
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X is a GREAT way to learn the basics of programming Mac OS X! I've been a Mac user since 1988, but have always been terrified of programming it. Instead I'd gone the evil route and programmed Delphi for Windows. NO MORE. I'm excited about programming my Macs!THE BAD
The title is probably a misnomer, which is causing a lot of the negative feedback here. "Complete Introduction to the Power Of Cocoa" would have been more appropriate. This book isn't any type of reference book. Nor is it a text on programming philosophy. Nor is it a "Learn Objective-C" manual. And it's not a comprehensive "learn everything about Cocoa" book. My positive remarks about these perceived liabilities are in "THE GOOD" paragraphs below. There ARE some typos in the book, but no real errors in the code that I've discovered. In many chapters, you're adding to a program you've built from an earlier chapter. On two or three occasions, variable names in the "new" chapter are different from the "old" chapter. But when doing the build, it became quite obvious and wasn't really much of an impediment -- if you can't follow the program flow and detect the problem by time you reach these chapters, you probably rushed or shouldn't be programming! Still, though, it IS a legitimate "bug" in the book. It's probaby useful that you know something about object-oriented programming. I don't mean knowing C or C++ or Objective-C -- just know a little about object-oriented concepts. Chances are, if you're a modern programmer, you already know enough to make this "bad" point meaningless. If you're a very advanced object-oriented programmer, you may want to FORGET some of what you know to appreciate the pure simplicity of the Objective-C/Cocoa object model! THE GOOD
It's an in-depth introduction to programming Cocoa in Objective-C. It will get you excited. It will spark your imagination as you work through the example code. You will want to learn Cocoa and forget everything else. If you know programming in general, you probably DON'T need to know C or C++ or even Objective-C prior to working with this book. I came to it with an Object Pascal background with no working knowledge of C. If you can THINK then you can pick up Objective-C as you work through the book. It's REALLY very simple, even in comparison to Object Pascal. The book is very well supported on the website. There's even a page-search function with errata and user-feedback in case you get in trouble. I've used it for help with a couple of the chapter "challenges." RECOMMENDATIIONS
Buy this book, and work through it, and try the challenges. You'll often HAVE TO work through the Cocoa documentation to do the challenges, but this is good because you'll need to learn how to use the documentation to do any serious work. When you're done with the book, you'll be confident and thrilled, and be ready to buy a true reference book (which I'm just getting ready to do!).
Excellent tutorial introduction to Cocoa. October 5, 2002
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
This book is an excellent introduction to Cocoa. It is basically what "Learning Cocoa" should have been. It is clearly not the only Cocoa book that you will want, but it will get you to the point that you can read and use other sources. The examples are well chosen and build up incrementally, so you can clearly see that code that is associated with new features as you add them. The book does get to full-up applications, but only simple ones. In this sense, I think this book joins nicely with "Cocoa Programming" or "Building Cocoa Applications". This book does the introductory and tutorial build up better than the other books, I think, although in less detail, and then you can go on to more elaborate applications elsewhere.The book presumes knowledge of C and the rudiments of object-oriented programming. You can get this as go, from Apple's "The Objective C Programming Language" but you'll need to go slower and be prepared for some puzzles along the way. Also, you really need only minimal knowledge of C, mainly understanding of pointers, to work through the examples in the book. There are a few weaknesses in the book. The description of the tools, Interface Builder and Project Builder, is sparse, and the book is now a bit out of date with the current incarnation of the tools that Apple is actually shipping. The differences are minor, but can sometimes be perplexing for beginners. Also, the tools (IB in particular) can be set up in various window "modes" that totally change the layout of parts of the tool. This isn't mentioned here, or in any other Cocoa book I've seen. These however, are minor quibbles in an excellent introduction to Cocoa programming. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to start programming under Mac OS X.
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