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While in the process of writing and launching DomainBrain, a few friends asked me where to find good info for getting started with Cocoa programming. In the interest of flattening the learning curve for others, here’s a list of the books, tutorials and websites that helped me the most.

Even as a newcomer to Mac programming, with the help of these resources I was able to learn enough about Objective-C and Cocoa to write a useful and functional app for the Mac without too much pain and heartache. Your mileage may vary, but this list should get you down the road a bit.

Introductory Tutorials

O’Reilly’s Programming With Cocoa Tutorials
A series of tutorials helpful for introducing the basics of Cocoa programming - Xcode, Interface Builder, how an app actually goes together. Start at the bottom and work your way up as needed. I abandoned them at about the 11th tutorial, but they were very helpful up until that point.

Cocoa Dev Central
Compiled by Scott Stevenson, Cocoa Dev Central has a nice mix of very basic and more advanced tutorials, and links to other resources.

Reference Websites

Cocoa Reference Library
Apple’s own documentation on Cocoa’s various frameworks and classes. Many of the listings can be annoyingly brief, but they generally give a good overview of what methods are available to what classes.

CocoaDev
This wiki run by Steven Frank was by far the most useful resource I found. Some of the discussions were a bit intimidating for a beginner, but the example code written by the site’s users on many of the topics went a long way towards explaining how classes and methods could be put to use. When trying to figure out a coding problem, I would often have to piece together info from several different websites, and it was rare that the search function at CocoaDev wouldn’t point me towards at least some of the information I needed to arrive at a solution.

Books

Programming In Objective-C
This book by Stephen Kochan was a great intro to the Objective-C language. It starts you off writing very simple programs and compiling them in the Terminal, so you don’t even have to worry about figuring out Xcode and Interface Builder right off the bat. Probably not a great book if you have a decent amount of programming experience already - it spends quite a bit of time on some basic programming concepts like loops and variables and such. But if this is your first programming language - or you’re a bit rusty - it’s a good place to start.

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
I haven’t actually read this book yet (the third edition wasn’t out yet, and I decided to wait for it rather than purchase the second edition), but from what I understand, any list of Cocoa resources would be remiss not to mention it. Aaron Hillegass’ book is widely considered to be the bible of Mac OS X programming.

So that’s my list. If you know of any great Mac OS X programming resources that I missed, leave a comment to let others know about them.

~ Filed in Apple, Code, Ramblings, Software ~