Suitable for anyone with a little C/C++ programming experience who wants to create software for the newest Mac platform, Cocoa Programming for Max OS X provides a slickly packaged and approachable tutorial that will get you started creating state-of-the-art Mac programs.

The smart presentation style and easy-to-understood code examples help make this text an excellent resource. (It also helps that Aaron Hillegass is a truly engaging writer.) He first explains how the legacy NeXTSTEP platform has evolved into Cocoa on the Mac OS X. Beginning with short examples illustrating the actual Cocoa tools in action, the author gets you started with simple programs for a random-number generator, a raise calculator, and other comprehensible examples. Rather than just listing APIs and classes, the emphasis is on hands-on Cocoa development. An early standout section provides a nice tour of essential Objective-C features you'll need to know to use Cocoa effectively.

This book covers the several dozen built-in Cocoa controls, from basic text and buttons to more advanced widgets (including lists and tables). Subsequent sections look at user interface design (using the Interface Builder to create nib files) and how to add programmatic processing behind the visual layout. Along the way, the author introduces coverage of essential Cocoa APIs for strings, arrays, and dictionaries. Later chapters look at saving and loading documents (and user defaults) and how to tap the powerful graphics abilities available in Cocoa. (Besides image and basic drawing, there are short sections on PDF support and printing.)

More advanced user interface features get their due by the end of the book, including cutting and pasting data through the Cocoa pasteboard and also adding drag-and-drop support. Final sections look at creating new controls for use with the Interface Builder palette, and, briefly, how to use Java with Cocoa (an option that the author doesn't necessarily recommend). Throughout this text, the author provides more advanced, challenging problems at the end of each chapter for the "more curious" reader. This approach keeps beginners from getting lost in the details of Cocoa development, but gives the more advanced reader something more to do.

While there are comparably fewer books on Mac OS X compared to other platforms, readers are lucky to have this one available. Anyone who wants to get onboard with Cocoa development will be well served by this title. It's a fine tutorial that earns high marks for its approachable, clear examples and an excellent presentation by an author who knows his stuff and, better yet, knows how to teach it to others. —Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Brief history of the Mac platform (from NeXTSTEP to Mac OS X), basic Cocoa development in Objective-C, using Project Builder and Interface Builder tools, tutorial to Objective-C (instances, variables, using classes, arrays and other containers, custom classes), the Objective-C debugger, basic Cocoa controls (building user interfaces), tables and data sources, event handling and delegates, archiving documents (encoding and decoding, saving and loading documents), Nib files, window panels, saving and retrieving user defaults (including using dictionary classes), notifications (observers and more on delegates), alert panels, localization (including string tables, a English and French example, the nibtool utility), custom views and drawing, drawing images and mouse events (plus coordinates systems and autoscrolling views), responders and keyboard events, fonts and strings (including attributed strings and PDF support), pasteboards and nil-targeted actions, using Objective-C categories (a code reuse feature), drag-and-drop support, timers, sheets and drawers, formatting strings, printing support, on-the-fly menu updating, text editing with text views, basic tutorial for using Java with Cocoa, and custom Interface Builder palettes (and inspectors).

Programming in Objective-C 2.0 provides the new programmer a complete, step-by-step introduction to the Objective-C language. The book does not assume previous experience with either C or object-oriented programming languages, and it includes many detailed, practical examples of how to put Objective-C to use in your everyday programming needs.

Objective-C has become the standard programming language for application development on the Mac OS X and iPhone platforms. A powerful yet simple object-oriented programming language that’s based on the C programming language, Objective-C is widely available not only on OS X but across many operating systems that support the gcc compiler, including Linux, Unix, and Windows systems.

The second edition of this book has been updated and expanded to cover Objective-C 2.0. It shows not only how to take advantage of the Foundation framework’s rich built-in library of classes but also how to use the iPhone SDK to develop programs designed specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

Part I: The Objective-C 2.0 Language

2 Programming in Objective-C

3 Classes, Objects, and Methods

4 Data Types and Expressions

5 Program Looping

6 Making Decisions

7 More on Classes

8 Inheritance

9 Polymorphism, Dynamic Typing, and Dynamic Binding

10 More on Variables and Data Types

11 Categories and Protocols

12 The Preprocessor

13 Underlying C Language Features

Part II: The Foundation Framework

14 Introduction to the Foundation Framework

15 Numbers, Strings, and Collections

16 Working with Files

17 Memory Management

18 Copying Objects

19 Archiving

Part III: Cocoa and the iPhone SDK

20 Introduction to Cocoa

21 Writing iPhone Applications

Part IV: Appendixes

A Glossary

B Objective-C 2.0 Language Summary

C Address Book Source Code
D Resources