Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 2nd Edition

Learning Cocoa with Objective-C is the "must-have" book for people who want to develop applications for Mac OS X, and is the only book approved and reviewed by Apple engineers. Based on the Jaguar release of Mac OS X 10.2, this edition of Learning Cocoa includes examples that use the Address Book and Universal Access APIs. Also included is a handy quick reference card, charting Cocoa's Foundation and AppKit frameworks, along with an Appendix that includes a listing of resources essential to any Cocoa developer--beginning or advanced.

Completely revised and updated, this 2nd edition begins with some simple examples to familiarize you with the basic elements of Cocoa programming as well Apple's Developer Tools, including Project Builder and Interface Builder.

After introducing you to Project Builder and Interface Builder, it brings you quickly up to speed on the concepts of object-oriented programming with Objective-C, the language of choice for building Cocoa applications. From there, each chapter presents a different sample program for you to build, with easy to follow, step-by-step instructions to teach you the fundamentals of Cocoa programming. The techniques you will learn in each chapter lay the foundation for more advanced techniques and concepts presented in later chapters.

You'll learn how to:

• Effectively use Apple's suite of Developer Tools, including Project Builder and Interface Builder
• Build single- and multiple-window document-based applications
• Manipulate text data using Cocoa's text handling capabilities
• Draw with Cocoa
• Add scripting functionality to your applications
• Localize your application for multiple language support
• Polish off your application by adding an icon for use in the Dock, provide Help, and package your program for distribution

Each chapter ends with a series of Examples, challenging you to test your newly-learned skills by tweaking the application you've just built, or to go back to an earlier example and add to it some new functionality. Solutions are provided in the Appendix, but you're encouraged to learn by trying.

Extensive programming experience is not required to complete the examples in the book, though experience with the C programming language will be helpful. If you are familiar with an object-oriented programming language such as Java or Smalltalk, you will rapidly come up to speed with the Objective-C language. Otherwise, basic object-oriented and language concepts are covered where needed.

This book was contributed to by the technical writers, engineers, support specialists, and other professionals at Apple Computer, Inc., who are committed to making Mac OS X a superior platform for innovation, productivity, and enjoyment. These professionals have diligently collected, compiled, and edited the information in this books to ensure that it is a useful resource for Mac OS X developers.

James Duncan Davidson is a freelance author, software developer, and consultant focusing on Mac OS X, Java, XML, and open source technologies. He is the author of Learning Cocoa with Objective-C (published by O'Reilly & Associates) and is a frequent contributor to the O'Reilly Network online website as well as publisher of his own website, x180 (http://www.x180.net), where he keeps his popular weblog. Duncan was the creator of Apache Tomcat and Apache Ant and was instrumental in their donation to the Apache Software Foundation by Sun Microsystems . While working at Sun, he authored two versions of the Java Servlet API specification as well as the Java API for XML Processing. Duncan regularly presents at conferences all over the world on topics ranging from open source and collaborative development to programming Java more effectively. He didn't graduate with a Computer Science degree, but sees that as a benefit in helping explain how software works. His educational background is in Architecture (the bricks and mortar kind), the essence of which he applies to every software problem that finds him. He currently resides in San Francisco, California.