The smart presentation style and easy-to-understood code examples help make this text an excellent resource. (It also helps that Aaron Hillegass is a truly engaging writer.) He first explains how the legacy NeXTSTEP platform has evolved into Cocoa on the Mac OS X. Beginning 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 know 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 keeps beginners from getting lost in the details of Cocoa development, but gives the more advanced reader something more to do.

While there are comparably fewer books on Mac OS X compared to other platforms, readers are lucky to have this one available. Anyone who wants to get onboard with Cocoa development will be well served by this title. It's a fine tutorial that earns high marks for its approachable, clear examples and an excellent presentation by an author who knows his stuff and, better yet, knows how to teach it to others. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Brief history of the Mac platform (from NeXTSTEP to Mac OS X), basic Cocoa development in Objective-C, using Project Builder and Interface Builder tools, tutorial to Objective-C (instances, variables, using classes, arrays and other containers, custom classes), the Objective-C debugger, basic Cocoa controls (building user interfaces), tables and data sources, event handling and delegates, archiving documents (encoding and decoding, saving and loading documents), Nib files, window panels, saving and retrieving user defaults (including using dictionary classes), notifications (observers and more on delegates), alert panels, localization (including string tables, a English and French example, the nibtool utility), custom views and drawing, drawing images and mouse events (plus coordinates systems and autoscrolling views), responders and keyboard events, fonts and strings (including attributed strings and PDF support), pasteboards and nil-targeted actions, using Objective-C categories (a code reuse feature), drag-and-drop support, timers, sheets and drawers, formatting strings, printing support, on-the-fly menu updating, text editing with text views, basic tutorial for using Java with Cocoa, and custom Interface Builder palettes (and inspectors).

Product Description

The best-selling introduction to Cocoa, once again updated to cover the latest Mac programming technologies, and still enthusiastically recommended by experienced Mac OS X developers.

“Aaron’s book is the gold standard for Mac OS X programming books?beautifully written, and thoughtfully sculpted. The best book on Leopard development.”

?Scott Stevenson, www.theocacao.com

“This is the first book I’d recommend for anyone wanting to learn Cocoa from scratch. Aaron’s one of the few (perhaps only) full-time professional Cocoa instructors, and his teaching experience shows in the book.”

?Tim Burks, software developer and creator of the Nu programming language, www.programming.nu

“If you’re a UNIX or Windows developer who picked up a Mac OS X machine recently in hopes of developing new apps or porting your apps to Mac users, this book should be strongly considered as one of your essential reference and training tomes.”

?Kevin H. Spencer, Apple Certified Technical Coordinator

If you’re developing applications for Mac OS X, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, Third Edition, is the book you’ve been waiting to get your hands on. If you’re new to the Mac environment, it’s probably the book you’ve been told to read first. Covering the bulk of what you need to know to develop full-featured applications for OS X, written in an engaging tutorial style, and thoroughly class-tested to assure clarity and accuracy, it is an invaluable resource for any Mac programmer.

Specifically, Aaron Hillegass introduces the three most commonly used Mac developer tools: Xcode, Interface Builder, and Instruments. He also covers the Objective-C language and the major design patterns of Cocoa. Aaron illustrates his explanations with exemplary code, written in the idioms of the Cocoa community, to show you how Mac programs should be written. After reading this book, you will know enough to understand and utilize Apple’s online documentation for your own unique needs. And you will know enough to write your own stylish code.

Updated for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5, this revised edition includes coverage of Xcode 3, Objective-C 2, Core Data, the garbage collector, and CoreAnimation.

After reading Cocoa Programming for OS X, I feel I can say I "get" Cocoa finally. That's not to say I'm an expert, but that I can complete a simple program now, on my own, using the Cocoa frameworks and concepts. As Aaron says in the book, learing the Cocoa APIs will take much longer. I come from a Java background, with only marginal C and C++ experience. Although Aaron does not speak much about the objective-c language itself, that's ok. Apple's PDF is more than adequate to get that background.

There are some things that get glossed over that I wish had been more fully explained, and some things left out altogether that I would have liked to see, such as:

-- Spawning and managing multiple threads, thread safety issues

-- exception handling, debugging and assertions

-- Cocoa "primitive" objects (NSPoint, NSRect, NSRange, etc.), why they apparently don't need to be retained or released, and why they are "NS" objects but don't really behave like them.

-- Calling Toolbox routines or those from APIs that have not yet been "Cocoa-ized" (and integrating the Old Way into the Cocoa Way), with examples. Cocoa is nice but once you get away from building a text editor, you will need to dig into this ugly and unfriendly world at some point (unfortunately). For instance, how do I access the Airport card, how do I open and use a network socket, how can I read a DV-encoded stream from a FireWirePort and save it to disk as a QuickTime movie, how do I access a database, how do I use an OpenGL view?

-- How to customize Cocoa UI elements. Like if I wanted an NSSlider with TWO sliders, a minimum and a maximum. There is an example of subclassing an NSView in the book, but that's just a drawing panel.

To be fair, I'm not really criticizing Aaron for these things. The book has plenty of useful stuff, and I'm sure Aaron wants to write and sell more books, so some advanced Cocoa books that address some of these things as well as others will be welcome...I hope someone is writing them right now. I also hope someone is writing a comprehensive Cocoa API reference, as Apple's is somewhat lacking (Have you seen the phrase "Description Forthcoming" more times than you care to remember? I thought so.)

The bottom line is that this is a great book that is a must-have for anyone interested in Cocoa programming. I'd probably rate it four or four-and-a-half stars, but I'm giving it five for being there when I needed it, and being the first really useful book on the subject. The best thing I can say about it is that I can now do things there is simply no way I could have before.


Great intro, a few nits   February 4, 2002
 81 out of 82 found this review helpful

First my background. I'm a very experienced C++ programmer who is also very experienced with Carbon.

I found this book to be a great intro to Cocoa without a lot of preaching about how Cocoa will change the world. Carbon vs. Cocoa seems to be an almost religous debate, and I'm glad this book didn't try to overpromise the benefits of Cocoa.

The book is well organized, very readable, and has good examples. It is *much* better than the O'Reilly "Learning Cocoa" book.

After reading this book, you'll be able to start writing applications in Cocoa, and you'll know where to go for more info.

Now, my nits:

* The book explicitly stated that it was for people with a C++ or java background, but I think there should have been more direct comparisions between C++/java and Objective C. For example, saying that class functions (the ones with +) are just like static functions in C++ would have helped.

* This may be an introductory book for people moving from other platforms to the Mac, but the UI for most of the applications violated Apple's UI guidelines in many ways. I think the book should have promoted following Apple's UI guidelines.

* There was no discussion of exceptions, and much of the code was not exception-safe and didn't do much error checking. There wasn't even the usual disclaimer about leaving that out for simplicity.

* I would have liked a quick overview at the end of some of the classes not discussed in the book with a couple of sentences about what they do. This would help to learn what's out there.

I hope to see more books on Cocoa by the author. There's still lots of room for books on more advanced Cocoa topics.


Getting started in Cocoa   September 16, 2002
 29 out of 29 found this review helpful

First, I have to say I loved this book, I actually read half of it on a trip, not being in front of my computer, and still enjoyed the clear style and the gradual addition of new concepts and tools, chapter after chapter. Then I could hardly wait to be back home and start doing it for real.

Now for the potential buyer.

WHAT IT IS NOT: a reference book (no list of classes etc...) or a technical book for advanced programming; a book about Java or Carbon; an introduction to object-oriented programming; an introduction to C.

WHAT IT IS: an excellent introduction to programming in Objective C in the Cocoa environment of Max OS X, provided you know enough about
object-oriented programming (some basic understanding of C++ is preferable too).

WHAT YOU LEARN: Objective-C in Cocoa; using Apple Developer Tools; building an application in Mac OS X; how to make optimal use of Cocoa classes and API, knowing how they were conceived and meant to be used; a number of basic concepts and tips that really get you started.

THE PLUS that make this book so interesting: very good and clear writing; some amusing brief 'historical' insights; you really feel the author knows what he is talking about; the author gives personal views (clearly stated as advices, not rules); follow-up, errata, examples, comments, and more on his web site; still completely useable with OS X.2 (a couple or very minor changes that are listed on the web site anyway), so that's the good time to buy it (price is down, but content is still up to date).

Final comment: Objective C in Max OS X is very powerful and enjoyable.


Cocoa yes, Objective C no   September 2, 2005
 28 out of 40 found this review helpful

I picked this book up as my first real effort to learn what developing on the Mac involves. The Mac is pretty complicated under the covers, cocoa is the 'easy' way to gain access to the Mac's power, and I learn best when there are a love of examples and explanation. Since then I've had a love/hate relationship with this book. Some of which isn't Aaron Hillegass' fault at all and some is probably an inherent flaw of a book for geeks by a geek.

In general, the book is an excellent introduction - well-written and loaded with programming exercises, Hillegas provides some introductory chapters on the Cocoa framework and the more common place aspects of Objective C and then you are off on a whirlwind tour of a very complicated country. If you stick to it, this book will teach you a lot. Unfortunately, ne of the things you will learn about is Objective C.

I've gone through the C, C++, and Java stages of software development. While I've forgotten most of what I knew, Objective C has a number of quirky ways of expressing itself. It has a piecemeal style of memory management which I find more leak prone than C++ and an inconvenient grammar that seems to dote on unnecessary numbers of brackets. Anyone who is used to Jave or C++ is going to find Objective C irritating. This isn't Hillegass' fault, but he has a habit of using extra long method names that brings out the worst of the language. I believe it's a modern geek thing to see just how long a name can be.

Hillegas wrote this edition before Xcode 2.0 appeared, and some of the examples, particularly in Interface Builder, don't quite make the transition, which can create some hairpulling. Eventually, you can figure everything out. I also found Hillegass's decidion to not make the source code available from his website a bit petty. While 99.99% of my problems were my own typing mistakes it would be nice to be able to download the source to see if it worked at all. He also includes a number of challenge assignments and refuses to provide more than vague hints. On several occasions my problem was that his assignment wasn't clear, not any real difficulty with the challenge.

I would also have appreciated a more methodical approach to Cocoa's architecture. I would have appreciated a walk of the framework hierarchy, but that has a lot to do with how I best learn frameworks. I'm still giving the book high marks, because it attempts to accomplish a lot, and it comes pretty darn close. But I've decided that learning to use Cocoa from Java would work better for me, even if Objective C is the current Apple standard.


Yes, I'm reviewing the 2nd edition   May 5, 2004
 23 out of 23 found this review helpful

I had the pleasure to attend the April 2004 Cocoa programming class at the Big Nerd Ranch. We used a looseleaf version of the final proofs of the 2nd edition of "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X". Short summary: Excellent.

I have the first edition of the book, so let me summarize some changes:

The book uses Xcode. Cocoa bindings are covered, including key value coding and key value observing. The document architecture is introduced early, and this is coupled to an early discussion of implementing undo. Topics are developed logically and incrementally. The discussion on Java has been dropped, while class notes on OpenGL have been moved into the book.

An early example has been simplified to flatten out the learning curve in the first part of the book. Code examples that are developed in stages now show the new lines of code in BOLD, a vast improvement when you're typing it in.

This book has been refined systematically based on feedback from real students at the BNR classes. This attention to detail really shows.

I recommend the book very highly. My only suggestion would be to use Apples "Objective C Programming Lanaguage" or "Programming in Objective C" (Steve Kochan) as an adjunct to this book if you need a slower introduciton to Objective C.