RubyCocoa Resources

The updated version of this book wasn’t available when I started learning Cocoa, so I used something else (an O’Reilly book) to get started. I spent three weeks painstakingly working through that one and regularly found myself looking back at my example projects and wondering what I had just done. So it was refreshing to read this in Aaron’s first chapter: Before going any further, assure yourself that you are not stupid and that some things are just hard.

Generally, I found this book very helpful, but its chapters were surprisingly uneven in difficulty. For example, categories (in Chapter 19) were much easier to get than the material on the pasteboard (Chapter 18) and drag-and-drop (Chapter 20). So instead of like being drug through gravel (by other Cocoa introductions), working through this book was like riding a bike through the mountains, sometimes fast and fun, but sometimes grindingly hard. A road map would have been nice, but I think part of the problem is intrinsic to the Objective-C/Interface Builder methodology. When so much of an application is defined in Interface Builder, you can’t just lay it all out in front of yourself at once to get a high level view.

Still, this is the first book I’d recommend for anyone wanting to learn Cocoa from scratch. Aaron’s one of the few (perhaps only) full time professional Cocoa teachers, and his teaching experience shows in the book. Generally it’s well-written and clear, and there are very few errors in its examples. I’m just sad that I didn’t get to use it for my own first time.