Scott Anguish | Erik Buck | Donald Yacktman
1 The essence of Cocoa
Cocoa is an OO framework for programming for Mac OS X. It has a vast amount of classes, protocols, and even functions. Thought Apple has done a great job of advancing and improving their own documentation on Cocoa over the last 2 or 3 years, you have to have a certain amount of familiarity with the framework to get your way around it. This book would be your best bet for such a guide on Cocoa. I've been using this book for a year now, and it has never let me down. It helped me to develop over the time that unique way of thinking, which you need to have to be productive and effective user of any framework. Thank you guys for writing this great book!
On a side note, I should say that the publisher has not done its job with book layout and such, so don't be intimidated by its size, it could have been much slimmer.
About the relevance. Yes, the book was written before even 10.2 came up, but it still has its purpose fulfilled. Yes, there is nothing in it on Cocoa bindings, but as I said in the beginning, it will give you a good start to get your way around the Cocoa reference documentation to find all the details. I urge the authors to update the book in the light of the recent developments.
To conclude, if you are serious about staring the software development in Cocoa on Mac OS X, this is the BOOK to read and have around.
2 From an author
Disclaimer: I am one of the authors.
Cocoa Programming provides intermediate and advanced programmers with the knowledge and techniques to produce powerful full-featured Cocoa applications. Cocoa Programming communicates the wisdom and design experience of three top-notch veteran Cocoa developers and includes technical information and insights that are not available from any other source.
Cocoa is Apple's powerful and mature object oriented development technology for creating Mac OS X applications quickly and efficiently. Apple recommends that all new applications written for Mac OS X use Cocoa. Cocoa is distinguished from other object-oriented development environments in several ways: Cocoa is mature, consistent, and broad. Cocoa is based on a cross-platform specification and has evolved from a cross-platform implementation. Cocoa is extraordinarily extensible, flexible, and dynamic in part because of Objective-C, the language used to implement it.
This comprehensive book covers virtually every aspect of Cocoa application development from the tools used to build programs to sophisticated multi-media and low level implementation details. Topics ranging from client-server networking to game development are covered. Examples that can be used directly in application code and a companion Web site, http://www.cocoaprogramming.net/, provide a treasure chest of reusable objects that illustrate the best practices developed through years of use.
3 The best most comprehensive book on Cocoa
This book is huge and packed with information. It has more information than any three other books on the subject. However, it is an intermediate to advanced book, so if you are just starting out you might prefer a more introductory book.
I particularly like the logical organization of the book and the comprehensive coverage of most topics. (The book predates the latest "Bindings" technology.) Even if you have been a Cocoa programmer for years, you will learn new things from this book. It covers whole subjects that no other book mentions and is packed with useful examples. There is no fluff, and every page is dense with information. It does not have the best tutorials, and it has a formal reference style unlike many of the other Cocoa programming books. I promise that even if you have one or more of the friendlier books, you'll still want this one for when you get down to business.
Finally, I loved the coverage of the Model/View/Controller design pattern in this book. There is a whole chapter that shows concrete examples of design using Model/View/Controller in conjunction with Cocoa and Objective-C idioms. After applying the wisdom provided by this book, I finally understood the value of Model/View/Controller and its near ubiquitous application in Cocoa.
