Cocoa Programming for OS X: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

by Aaron Hillegass, Adam Preble, Nate Chandler

<>Covering the bulk of what you need to know to develop full-featured applications for OS X, this edition is updated for OS X Yosemite (10.10),  Xcode 6, and Swift. Written in an engaging tutorial style and class-tested for clarity and accuracy, it is an invaluable resource for any Mac programmer. The authors introduce the two most commonly used Mac developer Xcode and Instruments. They also cover the Swift language, basic application architecture, and the major design patterns of Cocoa. Examples are illustrated with exemplary code, written in the idioms of the Cocoa community, to show you how Mac programs should be written.

 

After reading this book, you will know enough to understand and utilize Apple’s online documentation for your own unique needs. And you will know enough to write your own stylish code.

 

This edition was written for Xcode 6.3 and Swift 1.2. At WWDC 2015, Apple announced Xcode 7 and Swift 2, both of which introduce significant updates that (along with some changes to Cocoa for OS X 10.11) affect some of the exercises in this book. We have prepared a companion guide listing the changes needed to use Xcode 7 to work through the exercises in the book; it is available at 

Genres: Reference

555 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 2, 2015

About the author

Aaron Hillegass was working at NeXT when it was purchased by Apple. He founded Big Nerd Ranch in 2001. He is working on a PhD in Machine Learning at Georgia Tech.

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though the book was out for over two years when I read the book, it's still a pretty good book that covers a lot of what you need to get started on basic macOS development. If going through the examples, note that the version of Swift in the book is Swift 1, which is fairly different from existing version of Swift (and I would recommend learning Swift from another resource if you want to follow along since their code needs reinterpreting to the current version of Swift, especially if you haven't used Swift before), that built-in classes in Cocoa may have changed their names (though Xcode may help you with this depending on what version you use), and that you may need to add "@objc" attributes to some properties and functions for compatibility (e.g. selectors and KVO).

[Mark Broski · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really disappointed in this book. I was hoping for a deeper dive into the API. There are just so few books on Cocoa for OSX, I felt I had to take a chance. If you are a fan of Matt Neuberg-type books, then I would pass on this one.

[Paul Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's kind of a cheat to add this to the list of books I read, but I did indeed read it all. Extremely useful if you write or want to write Mac apps.

[Madhur Ahuja · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best book for Cocoa programming with Swift