Learning Cocoa

Preface

When you begin any enterprise, you must find a starting point. You set out from that starting point and acquire a basic vocabulary, a notion of boundaries and techniques, and a sense of how things fit together and what is possible. For those who want to learn how to create Cocoa applications, this book provides such a starting point.

This book eases your way into the experience of Cocoa programming. It encourages you to play, explore, and “kick the tires.” When you finish this book, you will be much better prepared to take on serious application development with Cocoa. Working through this book will not only make Apple’s development environment less mysterious, but also will make it an environment you’ll want to program in.

Extensive programming experience is not required to complete the examples in this book, though some experience with the C programming language is helpful. The code for each example is included in the text so you can simply type it in, and you can access the examples at the site listed in the URLs that follow. If you’re already familiar with an object-oriented programming language like Java or Smalltalk, you’ll quickly feel right at home with Objective-C, used throughout this book.

No prior experience programming on Mac OS X is necessary to complete the tutorials in this book. You may at some point want to explore the wealth of developer documentation that Apple includes with Mac OS X. In /Developer/Documentation, you’ll find detailed information on the Mac ...