Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by
Aaron Hillegass
Fantastic Book!
Suitable for anyone with a little C/C++ programming experience who wants
to create software for the newest Mac platform, Cocoa Programming for
Max OS X provides a slickly packaged and approachable tutorial that will
get you started creating state-of-the-art Mac programs. The smart
presentation style and easy-to-understood code examples help make this
text an excellent resource. (It also helps that Aaron Hillegass is a truly
engaging writer.) He first explains how the legacy NeXTSTEP platform has
evolved into Cocoa on the Mac OS X. Beginning with short examples
illustrating the actual Cocoa tools in action, the author gets you started with
simple programs for a random-number generator, a raise calculator, and
other comprehensible examples. Rather than just listing APIs and classes,
the emphasis is on hands-on Cocoa development. An early standout
section provides a nice tour of essential Objective-C features youll need to
know to use Cocoa effectively. This book covers the several dozen built-
in Cocoa controls, from basic text and buttons to more advanced widgets
(including lists and tables). Subsequent sections look at user interface

design (using the Interface Builder to create nib files) and how to add
programmatic processing behind the visual layout. Along the way, the
author introduces coverage of essential Cocoa APIs for strings, arrays,
and dictionaries. Later chapters look at saving and loading documents
(and user defaults) and how to tap the powerful graphics abilities available
in Cocoa. (Besides image and basic drawing, there are short sections on
PDF support and printing.) More advanced user interface features get
their due by the end of the book, including cutting and pasting data through
the Cocoa pasteboard and also adding drag-and-drop support. Final
sections look at creating new controls for use with the Interface Builder
palette, and, briefly, how to use Java with Cocoa (an option that the author
doesnt necessarily recommend). Throughout this text, the author provides
more advanced, challenging problems at the end of each chapter for the
more curious reader. This approach keeps beginners from getting lost in
the details of Cocoa development, but gives the more advanced reader
something more to do. While there are comparably fewer books on Mac
OS X compared to other platforms, readers are lucky to have this one
available. Anyone who wants to get onboard with Cocoa development will
be well served by this title. Its a fine tutorial that earns high marks for its
approachable, clear examples and an excellent presentation by an author
who knows his stuff and, better yet, knows how to teach it to others.
--Richard Dragan Topics covered: Brief history of the Mac platform (from
NeXTSTEP to Mac OS X), basic Cocoa development in Objective-C, using
Project Builder and Interface Builder tools, tutorial to Objective-C
(instances, variables, using classes, arrays and other containers, custom
classes), the Objective-C debugger, basic Cocoa controls (building user
interfaces), tables and data sources, event handling and delegates,
archiving documents (encoding and decoding, saving and loading
documents), Nib files, window panels, saving and retrieving user defaults
(including using dictionary classes), notifications (observers and more on
delegates), alert panels, localization (including string tables, a English and
French example, the nibtool utility), custom views and drawing, drawing
images and mouse events (plus coordinates systems and autoscrolling
views), responders and keyboard events, fonts and strings (including
attributed strings and PDF support), pasteboards and nil-targeted actions,
using Objective-C categories (a code reuse feature), drag-and-drop
support, timers, sheets and drawers, formatting strings, printing support,
on-the-fly menu updating, text editing with text views, basic tutorial for
using Java with Cocoa, and custom Interface Builder palettes (and
inspectors).
Personal Review: Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron
Hillegass
I haven't finished it yet but I'm loving this book. It's extremely easy to read
and follow along without getting lost. The author writes in somewhat of a
conversational style, as opposed to a highly technical and analytical
fashion. In the interest of concentrating on 1 idea/topic at a time he often
will say something like "this idea is known as ________, but it's not
important right now and we'll read about it in Chapter __". I think this is a

good thing; trying to learn a concept and then branching off onto smaller
tangents would make it hard to learn the language.
This was my first time learning a computer language from a book. For this
book, I'd recommend having a basic understanding of object oriented
languages. I've had minor experience with Java, and pretty extensive
experience with C/C++ and that was plenty of preparation for me. A lot of
concepts with Objective-C (used in Cocoa) are extremely similar to those
seen in C/C++, but with different syntax and keywords. Because of this,
Aaron will often teach concepts in Objective-C and relate the functionality
to Java or C/C++ concepts in order to solidify his explanation. For me that
helps a lot because some concepts are hard to grasp for the first time.
I'm extremely satisfied with this book. I did research before I bought it and I
think it paid off. Fun fact-- I've got a friend that works at Apple and he was
attending WWDC '09, and he saw Aaron Hillegass cruising around the
convention in his cowboy hat. I thought that was be pretty neat seeing as
Aaron is a bit of a celebrity in the Mac community :)
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