Rating: 
Summary: Lacks detail
Review: I thought the examples throughout the chapters and follow-up exercises were good. However, the author's explanations leave much to be desired. I'm very experienced at object oriented programming languages, yet there are passages within this book that make little sense to me. Basically, I felt as if the author sacrificed completeness for brevity. This is pretty much what other reviewers have said. I wish I would have heeded their warnings prior to buying this book. My advice is to pass on this book for something better.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Introduction/Tutorial
Review: Learning Cocoa with Objective-C presents a clear series of short examples that demonstrate many key aspects of Cocoa. The writing style is direct, and free from distracting stories or other fluff. I first purchased Hillegass' book, but started to become flustered with some of the examples which implemented concepts that had yet to be explained.I then purchased Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish which gave me great insight into the Cocoa concepts. After reading about half of Anguish's book I returned to the Hillegass book to get me hands dirty with some of the tutorials again, but I just couldn't get into the style of the book. I then picked up Learning Cocoa and found great relief in the clean format of the book. While the topics discussed aren't explored to a great depth, I feel that such brevity is appropriate for a tutorial book. Davidson does a good job of keeping the examples short and to the point (shaving literally pages off the Currency Converter example which is also presented in Apples docs). My recommendation would be to buy this book as a tutorial and buy Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish for reference and deeper exploration.
Rating:
Summary: Good Introduction/Tutorial
Review: Learning Cocoa with Objective-C presents a clear series of short examples that demonstrate many key aspects of Cocoa. The writing style is direct, and free from distracting stories or other fluff. I first purchased Hillegass' book, but started to become flustered with some of the examples which implemented concepts that had yet to be explained. I then purchased Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish which gave me great insight into the Cocoa concepts. After reading about half of Anguish's book I returned to the Hillegass book to get me hands dirty with some of the tutorials again, but I just couldn't get into the style of the book. I then picked up Learning Cocoa and found great relief in the clean format of the book. While the topics discussed aren't explored to a great depth, I feel that such brevity is appropriate for a tutorial book. Davidson does a good job of keeping the examples short and to the point (shaving literally pages off the Currency Converter example which is also presented in Apples docs). My recommendation would be to buy this book as a tutorial and buy Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish for reference and deeper exploration.
Rating: 
Summary: yeah woo ha
Review: This book is a clear learn by example introduction to Cocoa but is neither complete nor exhustive (which is obvious from the title keyword "Learning xyz"). You will not become a master of cocoa nor totally understand all aspects of Project Builder or Interface Builder. That will take time, patience and more books. This is a good introduction. Do not pay attention to the reviewer that suggested that the Davidson could learn something from Steve Oualline's Practical C++ Programming (O'Reilly). That book (which I also learned to program from initially) is quite bad and is filled with errors in examples and a very poor introduction to object oriented programming. What the reader should keep in mind is that this is an introduction a development system which is very complex and offers a great deal of power. Learning C/C++ is fairly straightforward. As an application framework I feel the learn by example format provides the fastest possible way to learn what the setup is. If you are unable to develop at least simple programs after this book then you may have to face the fact that the fault may not lie with the book but with your progamming knowledge in general. One more thing, if you are serious about learning cocoa then I can't recommend highly enough getting one of the class browser programs AppKiDo (which i prefer) or Cocoa Browser. They will only bring you joy.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Beginner Book
Review: This book is very good. It is much, much better than the first edition. It is very well written and easy to read. The examples are clear and their appear to be no major mistakes at all. The book does an effective job of introducing the reader to the major points of Cocoa programming. It gives you enough information to start writing simple programs by yourself. I believe this book is excellent preparation for the more advanced Cocoa books.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Beginner Book
Review: This book is very good. It is much, much better than the first edition. It is very well written and easy to read. The examples are clear and their appear to be no major mistakes at all. The book does an effective job of introducing the reader to the major points of Cocoa programming. It gives you enough information to start writing simple programs by yourself. I believe this book is excellent preparation for the more advanced Cocoa books.
Rating: 
Summary: Good try, but needs a bit more work
Review: This book needed one more pass by the proofreaders. There are an annoyingly large number of typographical errors and other mistakes. What surprised me is that after introducing a number of features of Interface Builder, the author tends to manually write code (e.g., outlet declarations) then load the results into Interface Builder to make the various object connections. It would have been better in my view to simply use Interface Builder to perform these tasks (certainly less error prone). Overall, the book is helpful in explaining a lot of issues, but I would have like the book to touch more in internationalization issues, such as how to handle input method editors and product localization. In real world programing, I'll need internationalization and input method editor handling before I need to worry about speech synthesis.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best Cocoa books available...
Review: This book was one of the best programming books that I have ever seen. While it had a lot of basics, it went completely through the Cocoa application development. I completed the entire books in less than a week work on this part time. The examples were complete and had very view mistakes. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to get started programming for OS X using Cocoa. This book si good for almost any level programmer. The only reason I did not give it 5 stars was because it had a couple of mis-prints and could have added a few more chapters going into more deoth in a few areas...
Rating:
Summary: Best cocoa book for newbies
Review: This is a note I sent to the author: I've spent the last year hopping bewtween intro C and cocoa books. When yours came out I almost didn't buy it, fearing yet another bout of
confusion. Thankfully, I made the purchase. I'm halfway through and confident I will not only finish but actually walk away with skills. Thanks
for remembering the beginner as well as your clear examples that provie detailed analysis each step of the way. If only all programming tombs were so well written.
Rating:
Summary: Super Introduction
Review: When I started this book, I had no knowlege of Cocoa (aside from the first version, which stank(stunk?)), or any programming besides Applescript.
This book seemed to know that, and didn't pretend that I had been a programmer for five years. The book got me familiar to Cocoa in probably the best way, and it's short, allowing me to find my next source of info. In short, whether you've programmed before (you probably want to have done some Applescript or BASIC first, though) or are a novice, this can get you started with a very powerful, easy language. it was kinda fun, too. I am not an adult.
| 
