Customer Reviews
out of date - By: R. Rutter, 18 Jul 2008 
the book refers to project builder rather than xcode. admits xcode was on the way when it was written, but says 'these instructions should work fine'. They didn't for me - the output from the first program never appears on screen. I've been googling for answers to this, & discovered the Apple documentation for xcode which I'll now have to study first.
Admittedly it does give instructions for compiling from terminal or windows if you prefer.
A great book! - By: M. Tsoukalos, 03 Nov 2006 
A really great book for learning Objective-C. Buy it & you will not regret it. It contains small (but complete) Objective-C examples for better understanding the language concepts.
One of the truly great language tutorials - By: A. J. Gauld, 02 Mar 2006 
I first discovered Objective Cin 1989 from Brad Cox's original book, but I wasn't impressed & learned C++ instead. Now I have an Apple & Objective C has won me round. I've read Hillegass & the Apple online help & that was OK, but this book really takes you into the language properly. It is very clearly explained & covers all the nooks & crannies that would otherwise trip you up - & had been tripping me up. There are very few great language tutors - & I say that as someone who has tried writing one, & know how hard it is! This is one of them.
Hey, where's the sixth star? - By: mabolek, 19 Jul 2005 If it was possible I would have given this book six stars. It brought me into programming Objective Cin a week (I tried to learn C many years ago, but got nowhere)! It's seriously the best book I have ever read on the topic of programming.
Kochan takes you through the fundamentals of Objective C programmingin an easy & very straight-forward way. When writing my first 100% self-made programs I was stunned that most errors I made were mentioned as possible errorsin the book.
The examples are also short. That's a big plus, because you can easily execute themin your head, keeping your level of understanding up.
Kochan also mentiones special fields that you MUST understand to continue. That's very nice, & probably saved me many times!
This book is a MUST BUY for anyone interestedin programmingin Objective C & especially for the Mac.
If only there were more programming books like this one... - By: Kayembi, 28 Jul 2004 This book is the most lucid book on programming I have ever read. Having a little (self-taught) experiencein C, this book was recommended to me as a good foundation before trying to learn Cocoa for programming on Max OS X. I fully expected to be confronted with the sort of doorstopper that I would never finish, as has been the case with several C++ books; instead, I found a straightforward, uncluttered guide, written by somebody with a genuine talent for teaching.
The author takes the approach of not trying to teach you C first, & this has two advantages: first, if you have no C experience, you get started immediately learning Objective-C, so you don't get taught one thing only to be told to forget it later; second, if you do have some C experience, you are thrown into object-oriented programming right from the start. The explanations are consistently concise but clear, & I found myself getting through a chapter or two every night after work & feeling that I was learning something significant on every page. I read someone describe it elsewhere as "Teach Yourself Objective-Cin 21 Days," except that this book really could live up to such a title. I wholeheartedly agree - it took me only three weeks to work through the whole book, including nearly all of the exercises. If, like me, you have seen terms such as "polymorphism", "inheritance", "instance method" & "subclassing" bandied around only to stare at themin mute incomprehension, this book is a revelation. The author introduces all such major concepts very gently -in fact they seem to creep up on you, so that by the time you are presented with the proper terminology you either already know what it means or find yourself exclaiming - as I did - "Oh, so that's all polymorphism is!"
My only gripe - & it is very minor - is that the explanations of bitwise operators & bitfields are near incomprehensible to anybody who doesn't have a programming background (or rather, they are explained well, but there is no indication of when you would ever use them), & the author does occasionally (though rarely) seem to assume that the reader has a solid maths background (when there are those of us out there from humanities & arts backgrounds who want to learn to program, too). These topics take up little more than several paragraphs of the 500 or so pages, though, so if you're a novice, don't let them daunt you as they are the exception rather than the rule.
One thing I appreciated about this book was that full code is provided for 99% of the examples - you are never left with an example that won't compile because the author assumed you could guess the rest yourself. Moreover, whilst the examples & exercises do develop on code from previous chapters -in particular, you will develop a Calculator, Fraction, & Rectangle classin the first part of the book, & AddressCard & AddressBook classesin the second part - the author wisely avoids the build-one-big-program approach that some books adopt. This keeps things fresh & lively - you have to typein different examples, meaning you become familiar with the language through repetition, but at the same time you are doing different thingsin the examples themselves. Moreover the exercises at the end of each chapter are well judged - you are forced to think & look back through the book to recap on what you have learned, & they are difficult without being too difficult. (Don't skip them!)
In the second part of the book, the author moves on to the Foundation framework, which forms half of Cocoa (Cocoa also uses the AppKit for creating GUI's). You will learn how to use NSString, NSArray, NSDictionary (and their mutable counterparts) & a lot more. It builds on everything you've learnedin Part One & provides a bridge between the basics of Objective-C & moving on to Cocoa. I expect that this part of the book especially will become dog-eared very quickly. To sum up, this book took me from knowing nothing about Ojbective-C to feeling as though I could write all the background code for the app I havein mind (ie. everything except the GUI). I am now just hoping that Hillegass's book on Cocoa is half as good.
A word of advice: I urge anybody who buys this book to print off the errata on the author's website (the address is givenin the book), as there are a few minor errors that might stump you if you don't. Also, if you use Xcode instead of the command-line tools, you will need to delete the contents of the automatically-generated ..._Prefix.pch file as well as the #import line at the top of main.m each time you start a project (the book only specifies the latter). The prefix file caused me some headachesin one of the later chapters.
A lot of people on various forums say that this is the only book from which to learn Objective-C, & I can see why. In short, if you are reading this review you are probably thinking about learning Objective-C, either for its own sake or as groundwork for moving on to Cocoa. Which means that if you are reading this review, you should buy this book.
