Cocoa and Objective-C: Up and Running: Foundations of Mac, iPhone, and iPod touch programming [Paperback]

I would agree with the previously-reviewed notion that this book as an absolute beginner's guide is misleading. I happen to be an experienced programmer who works day-to-day in an object-oriented language (but not Objective-C), utilizing design patterns. I found the shorter explanations useful...I learned a few things and some (Objective-) C concepts were made clear, but I didn't have to wade through pages of "this is a loop. This is a function" that gets tiring to one who understands the general programming concepts. But as one who moonlights as a college professor that teaches these very same concepts, I would expect a beginner to get quickly overwhelmed by this book.

I also feel the book's promise to teach iPhone/Pad programming misleading (the subtitle is "Foundations of Mac, iPhone, and iPad Programming"). Stevenson never introduces iPhone-specific programming concepts, or any of the unique aspects of Cocoa Touch and UIKit. There are mentions of such differences (like the discussion on CGImage, NSImage, and UIImage), but the mention is merely that, and no further information is provided. If you're looking to get into iPhone programming specifically, you can do better than this book. However, this book would supplement another iPhone book well, for its basics on C and Objective-C.

My biggest complaint is the Chapter 9 "real" application. Personally, I don't mind that it took that long to get to a practical app. But the chapter was basically one big "type all of this code in" with pages and pages of code on paper. The introductions to MVC and Core Data were pretty cursory, but I was hoping that through the practical example Core Data would be made clearer, and how it fit into MVC. Also, other topics such as drag-and-drop, fetch requests, and sorting were pretty much presented in the code and never discussed. Stevenson would do very well to refactor the chapter and present it in more of a step-by-step fashion. I found myself longing to hit "Build and Run" just to see something working, but knew that it would be pointless, because I just typed in a big, long class, which is supposed to use other classes that I haven't written yet. I just kept typing and typing, just sort of hoping that all would end well, and that I would have a clear understanding of how the app worked once it was done.

It didn't, and I don't.

What was needed were milestones. You know, just stub in a methods and properties, build and run. NSLog a few things, build and run. Flesh out the details of one of the views, build and run. Give the reader some stopping places where they can test the existing functionality against what they're supposed to see, and also just a stopping place in the reading! I couldn't do it all in one go, and it was difficult picking up where I left off the next day.

The funny thing (funny in a relative way) is that in the very next chapter, Stevenson does *exactly this* iterative approach that I'm talking about. We get into drawing into views, and we start with colors and rectangles. We build an app, and draw a colored rectangle. Hey, it works. Great, let's learn about bezier paths, now. Then move on to graidnets, and images, and then text, and then styling text, and finally user interaction. All the while, we build a simple (not very useful, but still cool enough) application that slowly builds up all of the techniques from a simple colored rectangle to an image with a border, shadow, and sheen, that's scaled properly, has a title that's rendered in a bezel below the image (and is optional) that can be dragged around the view and re-centered with a key press. We had so many stops along the way that it was pretty easy to check your work as you went, and I ended up with a working application, not to mention a much better understanding of these particular concepts. Chapter 10 is the model for what Chapter 9 should have been like.

That particular shortcoming is why I gave this book 4 stars instead of 5. If Stevenson addresses this, I'd happily give it 5. However, you need to be comfortable with a certain skill set before being able to harvest information from this book. That itself is not a flaw, although the marketing that implies otherwise is.

My opinion is very different from the previous reviewer. This book is a remarkable publication for all those who want dive into Cocoa development. You should keep in mind that learning Cocoa is not that easy. Cocoa is driven by Objective-C which is a superset of the C programming language. In other words: it is required to know the basics of the C programming language before you start with Cocoa. With that fact in mind, Scott's book is one step beyond it's competitors, because it also gives an introduction to the basics of the C programming language, a unique feature in my eyes. It is written in a very likeable style. The examples are similar to the ones published on Theocacao and Cocoadevcentral, very informal and of course understandable. I recommend it to everyone who is willing to seriously develop for Mac / iPhone / iPad. If I could give 6 Stars, I would.

EDIT: Due to a recent comment on my review I decided to revise it (I did not buy the book here so I can't post a reply to said comment). I understand your concerns but there is no need to worry. It is indeed my first review at Amazon.com but it is not my first Amazon review at all. I come from Germany. Please open my profile and change the URL from .com to .de and you will see some more reviews I posted on Amazon Germany. I'm in no way affiliated with the author. At the time my review was published, it was the first positive, now there are more because it is simply one of the best Cocoa books around. It is also true that I did not buy the book from Amazon, I bought it digital. I think it makes absolutely no difference whether Amazon is the source or not. I bought here countless times and I just felt a need of sharing my experience with other Amazon customers. I think Amazon benefits from reviews that come from non-customers.

Scott Stevenson's tutorials on Cocoa Dev Central have been an invaluable resource for new Cocoa developers for many years, with down to earth descriptions of the essential topics of Cocoa programming and the Objective-C language.

This book brings all that and so much more. It is certainly `the' Cocoa programmer's guide to getting up and running. Starting off with an essential setup guide, chapter two quickly jumps into code, with a great introduction to the C programming language and basic programming concepts that form the foundations of thinking in code. Covering the perfect amount of C, from the ground up the author discusses the basics of variables, functions, conditions and straight forward examples of a procedural application.

Chapter Three dives deeper into C discussing arrays, loops, pointers, primitive types, dynamic memory and more. Scott does a great job of introducing new concepts at a human level, making each new idea tangible. This is where his tutorials have always thrived, and these chapters are definitely where I wish that I could have started my journey into programming.

Chapter Four is where the fun really begins. Thinking in Objects. The author begins to introduce the conceptual foundations of object oriented programming, with clear-cut examples of designing objects. The following two chapters compose the best introduction to Objective-C that I have seen, covering everything from classes, syntax and memory management to dynamic language features like introspection and forwarding messages, interspersed with quintessential thoughts on object-oriented design.

The next chapter discusses the Foundation framework and its value classes, the lower level component of Cocoa. A subject that is often abstract comes through in tangible examples of working with objects and the real life data they represent. This chapter goes into detail discussing many of the value classes that you will use regularly developing Cocoa applications. Styled like a reference, but broken apart by relevant topics, you go through data objects, collection classes, mutability and more, and every class and topic comes with a healthy portion of code. The examples in this section are great.

Chapter Eight is like starting a new book. Titled Basic Controls, it jumps into the user interface level of application development and covers the basics of creating an interface and wiring it up to your code. There are a lot of new topics that go into connecting UI to code, and I think Scott does a great job here of peeling away the layers of the subject, using good examples that help you make sense of things quickly.

The next section was the most helpful to me, as a Cocoa developer with some experience but certainly not expertise, the discussion of Model-View-Controller design and the great sample application were just what I needed to be able to picture the beginning points of real applications in my mind.

I love the chapter on custom drawing, and the amount of coverage it has on the details of creating custom UI programmatically. The sample photo viewer app, with a nice shine drawn on the photo programmatically, cracks open a world of possibilities. And the section on refactoring view code is a true gem; this one part was my favorite.

The final word is a take away guide absolutely worth revisiting.
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Scott Stevenson has been an active member in the Mac developer community for many years, and has always been respected for his contributions through awesome tutorials on his website, focused on getting new beginners started, and great technical articles on his blog, ranging many topics relevant to writing software with Cocoa. I started with Scott's tutorials years ago, and have followed all of his material since, so I was really excited when this book was announced, and I can honestly say that it did not disappoint. It is the absolute best introduction to Cocoa programming with Objective-C, written by a true expert on the subject and one of the best teachers around.

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