macOS Yet another newbie developer thread

[dolphin842]

Hi all,

Apple's Xcode marketing has taken me in, and I'm looking to take the next step in my OS X usership by learning how to develop some simple apps. I don't want to get into anything really low-level... I just have some ideas for personal apps that would utilize frameworks like Core Data and such.

I've read through some of the previous threads, and have seen Kochan's Programming in Objective-C and Hillegass' Cocoa book promoted as the must-have combination for learning how to develop within the Mac environment. My question is, would this combo be good for what I want to achieve? I've also noticed that Wrox recently released a Beginning Mac OS X Programming book by Trent and McCormack. Does anyone have any experience with this new book, and whether or not it would be better suited to my needs than Kochan and Hillegass?

Thanks

 

[caveman_uk]

Most of the books currently available are a bit behind the developer tools and the APIs. They may cover Cocoa bindings if you're lucky (Cocoa bindings are pretty easy once you get the 'ah ha!' moment) but I'm not aware of any books that cover Core Data and the new Tiger stuff so you'll be left with the stuff on the Apple developer site and tutorials on the web.

I haven't got the new book you mentioned but from having a look through the TOC on Amazon it seems to want to cover both Cocoa, Carbon and the main scripting languages. Whether it does any of these well I don't know. It tries to cover the entire of the Cocoa APIs (including bindings but not core data) in 90 pages...which doesn't seem like much to me but from the TOC covers most of the major points. It claims to be for newbies and it might be but if you're a complete newbie to programming and would prefer a more 'handholding' introduction then maybe Kochan followed by Hillegass may be a better route? I can vouch for the Hillegass book-it is a very good introduction to cocoa.

 

[dolphin842]

Thanks for the reply,

Yes I am a total neophyte when it comes to programming.

I realize that the new Core technologies wouldn't be covered and that I'd have to rely on Apple's documentation... what I'm looking for in the books is to get the obj-c/cocoa background that would enable me to leverage the frameworks. I had the same concern that the new book may be 'too good to be true' in covering everything. I think I'm leaning toward the more established pair of books

 

[gamestriker]

I've also started learning cocoa recently with objective-C, and I could afford the Kochan and Hillegass books, so I can vouch for some of the good sites for cocoa. The ones I have found the most helpful are:

Apple's Cocoa Documentation site - http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/ - this is where I found their tutorial on Cocoa, and I learned the Cocoa basics. It also covers (though not always programmatically) how to do some of the more advanced stuff, like toolbars.

Cocoa Dev Central - http://cocoadevcentral.com/ - they have some great articles and tutorials for understanding the basics and more advanced stuff. The toolbar tutorial here is very good, definitely worth mentioning here.

Cocoa Dev - http://www.cocoadev.com/ - they also have some great articles and tutorials here covering a wide variety of cocoa topics, just like at Cocoa Dev Central. For maximum effectiveness, I suggest using Cocoa Dev, and Cocoa Dev Central together.

Right now, I rewriting one of my private Java apps in Cocoa, and I'm keeping the java version as the Windows versions.

Good luck with your cocoa studies!