Re: Best beginner's book

FROM : Joshua S Emmons
DATE : Thu Jan 09 20:23:27 2003

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.


Being a long time UNIX programmer, I also fell for the O'Reilly trap.
Learning Cocoa is crap.  I don't like/understand the author's writing
style more than half the time, and that's bad for a programming book.

They already have a second edition out that may fix some of this.  It's
called Learning "Cocoa with Objective C"
(http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learncocoa2/).

I looked around at non-O'Reilly stuff, and it was worse that Learning
Cocoa.  I despaired for a while and then found "Building Cocoa
Applications" (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/buildcocoa/).  This is
also by O'Reilly, but is much closer to their normal high standards.
It's pretty in-depth, but doesn't duplicate the Apple docs.  It
basically walks you through creating common application types step by
step, providing a good deal of relevant explanation. It leaves you to
(and sometimes prompts you to) peruse the Apple docs for less pertinent
details.

It's what I used, and I feel I've got a great grasp on ObjC and Cocoa
now. Being a "Step by step" and "By example" book, it makes a lousy
reference... but Apple provides all the reference you could want online
and in Project Builder.

cheers,
-josh emmons
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