Aaron Hillegass

Awesome introduction to Cocoa. However, I don't recommend you start with this if you don't know anything at all. Life may be easier if you learn some semblance of Objective-C first (super simple and should take a day to be familiar with basics if you already know another language, either through Apple docs, a little of Kochan's Objective-C book or some other similar resource), then tackle this book, since Hillegass doesn't explain much about the language and "Cocoa Programming..." is very show more literally mostly about Cocoa. Very example-based, may become a little annoying if it isn't fast-paced enough for you.

If you are in need of more than an introduction, Hillegass can be good for brushing up a little (and maybe learning more...like on core animation), but you're going to find the Apple docs to be more useful. show less

Quickest way to become a decent Mac programmer: The best part is that it's full of really useful Cocoa-specific programming patterns/best practices. You can tell that author of this book has experience with Cocoa since it even wasn't called Cocoa yet :)

Book has been written for Panther (10.3), but in Tiger (10.4) everything works exactly as described (all is still up-to date, I haven't found a single deprecated method in this book).

It has useful examples that are very close to the show more real-world applications and it teaches how to write a proper, well-behaved Mac applications with drag'n'drop, localization, per-user settings, ubiquitous undo, AppleScript, etc. show less

An extraordinarily rare technical book: works as class, refresher, or reference; highly accessible yet very thorough. Also the best introduction to Objective-C (which is required to work in Cocoa).

Good tutorial style introduction to Cocoa, Objective-C, XCode and Mac programming.

It seems likely that this is a book version of one of Big Nerd Ranch's Cocoa classes, as the book is very focussed on hands on examples.

A lot of the chapters are of the form "now do this..." as you follow the instructions and end up with an application by the end of the chapter, hopefully understanding what you did along the way.

It's not so useful as a reference book, but hopefully the online documentation show more covers that aspect.

It doesn't go into anything into a lot of depth, this is really an easy to follow tutorial, with lots of pictures, aimed at newbies. show less