Re: Best beginner's book

FROM : Jeff LaMarche
DATE : Fri Jan 10 16:11:56 2003

On Thursday, January 9, 2003, at 01:58 PM, Susan G. Conger wrote:

> I have been a Mac developer for over 15 years and I am trying to pick
> up Cocoa.  I have Learning Cocoa from O'Reilly but I don't really like
> it.  I am looking for suggestions on what the best book is for
> beginners.


I'll throw in my two cents here. I have Cocoa Programming, Cocoa
Programming for Mac OS X and Learning Cocoa, so I'll limit my comments
to these.

"Learning Cocoa" (the first edition, not the revised which must be
better) is bad in many ways. Someone in the know could likely write a
whole book on the reasons why this thing got published by O'Reilly, who
normally publishes excellent computer books, but it's definitely not
worth the money. You can get much of the information here in old NeXT
books that are still available some places on line, as this books was
mostly a rushed re-hashing (and abridging) of the old NeXT books.

"Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" - As many people have mentioned,
Aaron's book is very good. For a true beginner, I'd probably recommend
this one. It's a little steeply priced for the amount of content, but
that's what we get being a niche market. Aaron obviously knows the
material very well and the topics he chose to go into, he covers well,
and he does get the most important stuff.

"Cocoa Programming" by Anguish, Buck, and Yacktman (at least two are
list members, so I'd better be careful =) ). Actually, I bought this
book after I'd been programming with Cocoa for  over a year. I kept
talking myself out of buying it because I thought I'd know a lot of
what it had to say, but it was such a big book and at least two of the
authors have been very helpful to me at times on this list, so I
decided to go ahead and buy it. No regrets here: "Cocoa Programming" is
fantastic. It's definitely the book I'd recommend to someone like you
who's not new to programming, but is new to Cocoa. These guys know
their stuff and share it.  The book is easy to read and most of the
goofs in the code are obvious (like the typesetter inserting spaces
after periods in some of the code) and errata is available on the
web-site. This book is worth every penny and definitely the one I'd
recommend to you.

Hope this helps.
Jeff
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