Ask HN: Objective-C programming book

10 points by pstevensza 16 years ago | 7 comments

I found some brilliant discussion threads on learning C on HN, resulting in the purchase of the C Programming Language (2nd Ed) book and the C Puzzle Book, which I am working through at the moment. I've ordered C Interfaces and Implementations as well as The Practise of Programming, which should arrive shortly. As much benefit as I will derive from learning C, I'm interested in learning Objective-C, to allow me to write software for my Mac, as well as for iPhone, and therefore humbly ask if anyone has any recommendations for Objective-C books. I've found a Programming in Objective-C book written by Stephen Kochan for example, but wonder how good it is.

* Edited to fix errors

Zev 16 years ago |

Kochan's book is great for the language itself. But, that doesn't help you with the frameworks. For that, I'm a huge fan of Hillegass' Cocoa Programming (and its how I first picked up Cocoa), but, I'd only recommend it if you're more interested in the Mac than the iPhone. AppKit and UIKit are different beasts to learn.

Jeff LaMarche and David Mark's Beginning iPhone Development, Bill Dudney and Chris Adamson's iPhone SDK Development or Erica Sadun's iPhone Developers Cookbook are all very good books to look into (although, I vaguely remember hearing something like that Erica is working on another edition that covers iPad additions. May be worth holding off on this particular book for a bit..).

The problem is, the really fun stuff (Game Center, multitasking, and iAd to name some; there's many more fun things that are.) is still under NDA. Or maybe there's not many printed books written on the topic, period (Blocks/GCD, AddressBook, using Instruments to debug/optimize your app, etc). So you want to figure out how to read the docs and guides from Apple as quickly as you can. Which, luckily, isn't too bad to do — the docs tend to be very well written.

donmcc 16 years ago |

For learning your way around Cocoa Touch, I highly recommend Erica Sadun's "The iPhone Developer's Cookbook". I reviewed the first edition last year on my blog (http://blog.ablepear.com/2009/03/book-review-iphone-develope...). She recently released a second edition, which I haven't had a chance to read through yet, but is nearly twice as big as the first edition.

jtth 16 years ago |

Hillegass is good, and I haven't read much of it, but Kochan is amazing, and I've read almost every word of it. It starts out with just the language itself, moves slowly, and assumes little programming experience. Then it moves you into Cocoa and UIKit and all that goodness, but only after you get the basics. http://amzn.to/cYHKqg

pstevensza 16 years ago |

Thank you. Yet more sound advice from the HN community. The C Puzzle Book is good fun, and based on comments in the C threads, I cannot wait to get my hands on CII. I think I'll get my hands on this Programming in Objective-C 2.0 (2nd Edition) by Stephen G. Kochan and Erica Sadun's iPhone Developers Cookbook in due course.

towndrunk 16 years ago |

This one is a must have for the beginner.

http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-Mac-OS-3rd/dp/032150...

maheshbabu 16 years ago |

Don't look any where else other than the following books

1: Programming in Objective-C 2.0 (2nd Edition) by Stephen G. Kochan

2: Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 2nd Edition by James Duncan Davidson

frankus 16 years ago | |

I worked my way through #2, and it's a good one, but there've been a lot of changes (particularly on the Interface Builder side of things) to Apple's developer tools since 2002.