[carterx]

I have thought about it a number of times but today I finally put my foot down and decided to teach myself Cocoa.

Out of the gate I have no background in programming but I'm willing to sit down and spend the time to learn how to program with Cocoa.

Are there any good tutorials online that would be good to start with for a complete newbie? Also, from looking around most sources bring up the book "Learning Cocoa with Objective-C". Have many others read this book. Is it ideal for a Cocoa/Programming newbie.

Tks,

.

[apostacy]

carterx - FWIW, I just picked up Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X by Aaron Hillegass, although it assumes a knowledge of programming and object-oriented programming. So far it's pretty good, and it is really highly rated on amazon, so it might be something you pick up after you get the basics down.

[JordyD]

Cocoa Dev Central is good. It's not extensive, but it's a good introduction.

[carterx]

Originally Posted by JordyD 

Cocoa Dev Central is good. It's not extensive, but it's a good introduction.

Thanks, I caught this site the other day. I found this book Cocoa and Objective-C: Up and Running: Rough Cuts Version - O'Reilly Media which is written by Scott Stevenson who runs cocoadevcentral.com This book sounds great for someone that is new.

[Synotic]

I meant to reply to this earlier, but... Don't get the Learning Cocoa with Objective-C book. It was written 7 years ago and is basically a rehash of the (old) documentation.

I think that Scott's book is probably a good choice for getting started (more so than Hillegass' which is excellent but requires knowledge of OO programming and C; once you know those, though, you need to read it). Of course all the caveats of buying a rough cut apply, but I think you should be okay.

That said, I tried to learn Cocoa and Objective-C from the first book you mentioned and Hillegass' book (I even got pretty far) for years, but I never really grokked it until this summer when I had to write an iPhone app. To get up to speed, I went through Apress' well-paced, accessible series: Learn C on the Mac; Learn Objective-C on the Mac; and Beginning iPhone Development. If you want to start from the beginning, I highly recommend the series. If you sit down with each book and just completely go through all of the projects, you can get through all three of them in a week or two (with 4-6 hours of studying a day, with a few free days).

It's pretty difficult to get lost in that series, and they're in depth enough to give you a good conceptual understanding of each of the languages and frameworks. Once I went through those, it was much easier to understand Hillegass' book, the Cocoa Design Patterns book that's coming out, and pretty much any information on Cocoa available on the web. I highly recommend them.