[chezpaul]

I want to learn how to build programs in OS X. I'm a fast learner and only played with Pascal language for 2 years. What would be the best way to learn ? Is there a bible book ? And what language should I learn ?
Thanks for the recommendations. Sorry If I'm in the wrong forum.

[cpac]

as somebody who knows very little about it I can say:

you can write in a variety of things, but Objective-C is the basis of cocoa.

You can do a tutorial and learn a lot by downloading the developer tools and looking at documentation from Apple. All of that is free - at which point there may well be a book or seven that can help; but Apple's own free stuff is a good place to start.

[CharlesS]

I'd start by getting a good book on C until you get a good handle on the C language. If you know Pascal already, C won't be hard to learn at all. I used Dave Mark's Learn C on the Macintosh back in the day. It was a pretty good book, but by now it's a bit dated since it assumes you're using an ancient version of CodeWarrior in System 7. I'm sure there are some good books on C out there, though, and even regardless of this, the differences in the IDE shouldn't be that much of a problem, anyway - the C language is still the same (although there might be some minor things not covered by an older book such as the Mark book, such as how to take command-line arguments, which wouldn't have existed in OS <=9).

Anyway, once you have a good understanding of C, I'd read Apple's PDF file on Objective-C as it is pretty concise and a quick read but nevertheless does a pretty good job explaining object orientation and the like. Once you've gotten this far, there are a lot of good books on Cocoa (Aaron Hillegass's book seems to get recommended a lot) and lots of info on the Web as well, such as http://www.stepwise.com/ and http://www.cocoadevcentral.com/.

Hope that helps,
Charles

[Thinine]

Programming in Objective-C by Stephen Kochan and Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass are pretty much the only two books you need. You can get a lot from various web sites if you run into trouble.