Stephen G. Kochan

Hey, where's the sixth star?: If it was possible I would have given this book six stars. It brought me into programming Objective C in a week (I tried to learn C many years ago, but got nowhere)! It's seriously the best book I have ever read on the topic of programming.Kochan takes you through the fundamentals of Objective C programming in an easy and very straight-forward way. When writing my first 100% self-made programs I was stunned that most errors I made were mentioned as possible show more errors in the book. The examples are also short. That's a big plus, because you can easily execute them in your head, keeping your level of understanding up. Kochan also mentiones special fields that you MUST understand to continue. That's very nice, and probably saved me many times! This book is a MUST BUY for anyone interested in programming in Objective C and especially for the Mac. show less

I can't hate on Kochan. This guy had the best non-Apple introduction to Objective-C before everyone started jumping on the iPhone bandwagon.

But, be flexible. Apple docs are cool, forums and mailing lists and other resources are also pretty good. Some of Kochan's practices are not...ahem...acceptable to some developers, while others don't care. Generally not a problem.

My biggest gripe with this book is WHY on earth Kochan decided to give in and put in a fricken Cocoa and iPhone programming show more section. That's best saved for books like Hillegass' Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X and the various semi-mediocre iPhone development books out there. Just ignore the last sections. That also implies this book is not for someone wanting a Dummies guide to iPhone dev. It's the language, then you can learn cocoa touch and more elsewhere.

Anyone put off by this book may be interested in Mark Dalrymple's introductory Objective-C text instead...I have both, can't say if I really like one or the other, I don't mind having both :) show less

Superbly well written. It's almost like reading a novel.

Although somewhat dated, this book provides some valuable insights into how UNIX goes about doing networking tasks.