Rating: 
Summary: Overall, this book provides an adequate introduction, but...
Review: ...for me this book, by itself, came up a little short in certain areas. The first book on Cocoa programming that I had purchased was Aaron Hillegass' "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X". After reading and working the examples from the first 4 chapters of Mr. Hillegass' book, I was still having difficulty grasping the concepts -- or at least more difficulty than I thought I should be having -- of Cocoa programming. That's when I discovered Mr. Davidson's book at my local bookstore. After reading the first few chapters, I was able to grasp the concepts that had eluded me whilst studying Mr. Hillegass' book. Put simply: it all started making sense.In my opinion, neither book, by itself, provides a complete introduction to Cocoa programming; rather, it is the combination of *both* books that truly provides the introductory material that's fundamental to understanding Cocoa and Objective-C programming. In addition, Mr. Davidson has provided, in my opinion, a more logical and easier to follow progression of topics. Unfortunately, he also fails to provide sufficient depth on some topics after their introduction. Two examples that readily come to mind are the collection classes and memory management. On these two topics, I tip my hat to Mr. Hillegass for providing the better instruction because he: 1.) also explained and gave an example of using enumerators (think C++ interators) to traverse a collection, and 2.) because he gave a very good explanation of where and how to use autoreleased objects in functions. Overall, I think my biggest compliment about this book is that it maintains a high degree of consistency in the way topics are presented. My biggest complaint is that, in certain areas, the depth of the presentation is simply too shallow. With a little more sustenance, this book could easily become the de facto standard for an introduction to Cocoa programming using Objective-C.
Rating: 
Summary: A good book, but not the best book
Review: A very popular book, and greatly improved in its second edition. Very example and tutorial oriented; somewhat out of date at this point, however. Helps the user learn Interface Builder, ProjectBuilder and Objective-C, too. Possibly a bit shallow to get the reader writing their own Cocoa programs from scratch, but a good introduction. Ultimately, probably not as recommended for a first purchase as Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish or Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass.
Rating:
Summary: A good book, but not the best book
Review: A very popular book, and greatly improved in its second edition. Very example and tutorial oriented; somewhat out of date at this point, however. Helps the user learn Interface Builder, ProjectBuilder and Objective-C, too. Possibly a bit shallow to get the reader writing their own Cocoa programs from scratch, but a good introduction. Ultimately, probably not as recommended for a first purchase as Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish or Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass.
Rating:
Summary: A good book, but not the best book
Review: A very popular book, and greatly improved in its second edition. Very example and tutorial oriented; somewhat out of date at this point, however. Helps the user learn Interface Builder, ProjectBuilder and Objective-C, too. Possibly a bit shallow to get the reader writing their own Cocoa programs from scratch, but a good introduction. Ultimately, probably not as recommended for a first purchase as Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish or Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass.
Rating:
Summary: yeah woo ha
Review: After reading the first edition, I wasn't at all interested in buying the second edition until I read a review that indicated that the second edition wasn't just an updated rehash of the first. Indeed, this book is completely different. Where the first book was little more than Apple's online examples in print, this book incorporates step-by-step examples of simple applications that are used to demonstrate numerous Cocoa programming topics. I got almost nothing out of the first book. I am actually feeling somewhat confident and I am making progress on a couple of projects with the knowledge I have gained from this edition.
Rating:
Summary: A significant improvement!
Review: After reading the first edition, I wasn't at all interested in buying the second edition until I read a review that indicated that the second edition wasn't just an updated rehash of the first. Indeed, this book is completely different. Where the first book was little more than Apple's online examples in print, this book incorporates step-by-step examples of simple applications that are used to demonstrate numerous Cocoa programming topics. I got almost nothing out of the first book. I am actually feeling somewhat confident and I am making progress on a couple of projects with the knowledge I have gained from this edition.
Rating: 
Summary: Indispensible Guide for Moving from C to Object Orientation
Review: Being an old Pascal and C programer from the earlier Mac OS (systems 6 and 7) I was finding 1) that Carbon documentation was a mess, and 2) that Cocoa's object orientation was incomprehensible. So, in deciding which environment to work in to upgrade my old scientific apps, I felt stuck between two impossible choices. I wanted the power of quartz and the familiarity of C in a format I could learn. This book provides the indispensible introduction to object orientation that is a prerequisite for Cocoa and ultimately Apple's latest and greatest stuff under the hood. From there, the developer documentation and Garfinkel's or Hillegrass' books can take you the rest of the way. But, this is the place to start if you're conversant in c but not objects.
Rating:
Summary: Indispensible Guide for Moving from C to Object Orientation
Review: Being an old Pascal and C programer from the earlier Mac OS (systems 6 and 7) I was finding 1) that Carbon documentation was a mess, and 2) that Cocoa's object orientation was incomprehensible. So, in deciding which environment to work in to upgrade my old scientific apps, I felt stuck between two impossible choices. I wanted the power of quartz and the familiarity of C in a format I could learn. This book provides the indispensible introduction to object orientation that is a prerequisite for Cocoa and ultimately Apple's latest and greatest stuff under the hood. From there, the developer documentation and Garfinkel's or Hillegrass' books can take you the rest of the way. But, this is the place to start if you're conversant in c but not objects.
Rating:
Summary: GREAT Book To Learn Cocoa and Objective-C Programming From!
Review: I have both this book (Learning Cocoa with Objective-C) and it's predecessor (Learning Cocoa). These are two completely different books. The first book wasn't hardly worth the paper it was printed on, as it was mostly just a thrown together collection of rag-tag tutorials from Apple's web site. Thankfully, this book is NOT the first book! Fast forward to verison II, Learning Cocoa w/ Objective C. This book is great! It covers a whole slew of topics ommitted by the first version. Thankfully the content is NOT the same as before. A tiny bit of it is similar, but for the most part one person took it upon themselves to make sure that all of the material was presented in a consistent manner. By the end of this book you'll walk through all of the steps required to write an application similar to TextEdit (provided with Mac OS X). This application will support Rich Text Formatting, save and open capabilities, spell checking and much much more. You'll be impressed with what you build in this "Learning" book. If you've ever done the REALBasic tutorial you'll find that this creates a very similar application using the Cocoa Framework and Objective-C. All the basics of learning to write MAC OS X applications with Cocoa are covered here. Unlike the first version of this book it doesn't assume you already knew Objective-C or have had exposure to NextStep. If you're looking for a good book to expose you to Cocoa and Objective-C programming buy this book and work through it all. It's worth it! This book will also guide you through using the debugger in Project Builder. You'll learn how to use the debugger print-object command and other useful debugging techniques. This book does more than just point out the fact that the debugger exists. It shows you how to apply it usefully. Another thing I like about this book is the fact that it covers NSString's in more detail than other books of the genre. You'll see examples on how to pull substrings out of NSStrings and use NSRange. You'll also see demonstartions of using NSMutableString as well. Several other books merely mention that NSMutableString exists, but then fail to show what is different between the two. The excersises at the end of each chapter are very helpful in learning Cocoa Programming too! They're not too difficult, but not too simple either. They'll make you dig and think a bit to find a solution, but not so much that you'll want to pull your hair out and give up. AND If you go happen to get stuck you'll find answers revealed in the back of the book. This book is for the most part geared towards Mac OS X 10.2, but I did manage to do all of the examples in 10.1.5 (except with the programming example that made use of the Jaguar's Address Book, of course.) This is a bonus, for some of the earlier Cocoa Programming books do not take into account newer versions of Mac OS X and thus are now a bit out of date. Surprisingly, this book is thicker too, but only because it's now on quality paper. The book actually contains fewer pages (by only a dozen or so) than the original, but Cocoa programming is covered much more thoroughly. There's not much textual fluff or irrelevant screen shots to gobble up pages; --just the right balance of what is needed to cover Cocoa and Objective-C programming for the beginning or semi-intermeddiate programmer. If you already own the first book don't worry about buying this one and receiving repeat material. These two books are not the same animal (even though the dog on the front cover is the same). They are two totally different creatures with internal organs unique to themselves. In fact, after working through the second edition you might find the first edition more useful; --as you will have gained knowledge from the second version to more completely comprehend chapters in the latter part of the frist version. One more note: THANK YOU O'REILLY & ASSOCIATES! You're breathing new life into books for the Macintosh! Be it mac-only books (like this Cocoa Programming book) or just the fact that you include MAC OS X specifics in books like "Managing and Using MySQL (2nd Edition)". Myself and I'm sure many others appreciate it. Thanks!
Rating: 
Summary: This book does not leave you with more than examples.
Review: I have seen what is to be had from a good programming book in Steve Oualline's Practical C++ Programming (O'Reilly). One who works himself through a book such as this will find that he is able to move immediately beyond the scope of the textual examples into programs which he himself finds useful. The material is well-taught, in normal English, and confusing issues are solved by reviewing the text. Unfortunately, this is hardly the case with Learning Cocoa. Having read this book, I find that J.D. Davidson explains things poorly, speaks too often in a manner which some might consider advertisement of Apple's tools, and does not prepare one to apply what he has learned to his own purposes. I could not, as a result, recommend this book to anyone of my background (I learned to program C++ by Oualline's book, then came to Learning Cocoa). Davidson has a habit of "teaching" Cocoa in the following manner: 1. Create a project named x.
2. create these header and implementation files.
3. Copy the code I have written here in this book.
4. Read the explanation line-by-line which I have given you. The result of this system is that Davidson has successfully explained why his example programs run, but he has utterly failed to teach the reader to create a program which applies the topics he just touched on. Line-by-line explanations are only useful if they serve the purpose of abstraction, to create a model which can then be applied to a specific case. Davidson's explanations serve only his individual examples, as is obvious when a beginning programmer attempts to create his own application. It is also altogether too clear that Davidson is working under Apple's hand. At every opportunity, the phrase, "Apple has provided," or, "Apple's engineers created," is concatenated at the front end of a sentence for no reason other than to irritate the reader with what amounts to advertisement in a textbook. For example, at the beginning of the novel, Davidson attempts to explain objects. What does he use as a decidedly abstract example? An "Apple" iPod. This may seem nitpicky at first, but I find it very distracting and detrimental to the content. Lastly, it bears mentioning that this novel does not provide one with the means to move on. Halfway through the text, I was still not able to create my own programs, even of the most rudimentary kind, without intense difficulty and little help from the novel. Re-reading explanations is not helpful, as few of them are made abstract enough to assist a body in any of his own pursuits. Davidson must have understood this when he created the novel, because none of the exercises he provides go beyond one-line modifications. In effect, this book provides no semblance of applicable knowledge. A book that provides neither content nor focus nor a place from which to move on does not deserve the exhaustive hours required to read it. I have not yet explored other alternatives in the Cocoa programming world, however I strongly suggest that others look elsewhere.
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