Resources for Learning Cocoa

While Cocoa is nowhere near as large as some other APIs, it does cover an enormous amount of ground and it can be difficult to know how and where to get started. Thankfully, there is no paucity of information out there. Some of the resources that I’ve found particularly useful are listed here, partially so that I can find them again and partially so that other who stumble onto this page can do so too.

Books

• Become an XCoder is a free e-book I haven’t read yet.
• Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (3rd ed.) by Aaron Hillegass is the book on Cocoa programming
• Programming in Object-C 2.0 is an excellent and complete description of Objective-C 2.0, including it’s C underpinnings.

Documentation

• Apple Developer Connection is the obvious and authoritative source on Mac development, Cocoa and otherwise.

Sites

• CocoaDev is a wiki for Cocoa programmers. There are diamonds here, but they are accompanied by plentiful dross, like any wiki.
• Cocoa Dev Central has an archive of excellent articles and tutorials on many aspects of Cocoa programming. It also
• MacResearch has a series of excellent tutorials looking at Mac development for scientific purposes.
• LabNotes is a series of articles going beyond the Become an XCoder book linked above.

Blogs

• Planet Cocoa aggregates a whole bunch of Cocoa related blogs.
• Theocacao is always excellent.
• Tim Isted has posted some excellent Core Data tutorials on his blog Blog @ Tim Isted.
• Everything on Cocoa Blogs is worth reading (though I don’t subscribe to many of them).