An Introduction

Everyone seems to start one of these blogs when they're learning Cocoa, so I thought I'd start one too. Partly it'll help me to remember what I've worked out, maybe it'll help someone else too.

I've been programming in C/C++ on Unix for about 13 years now and I thought I'd expand my skill set. As such its unlikely that this blog will cover much about learning objective C or C and I'll probably take knowledge of those things as assumed. Maybe not, I've not written anything yet so who knows.

Recently I've been playing around with Controllers, ArrayControllers, ObjectControllers and ViewControllers, so I think I'll start with something like that. I also have an interest in audio and MIDI and graphics programming, maybe something will come from that.

Some books that I can recommend that I've found useful are two from Big Nerd Ranch:
* iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (2nd Edition) (Big Nerd Ranch Guides)
* Cocoa® Programming for Mac® OS X (3rd Edition)

Two very good tutorial style books that get the reader up to speed on beginning to program iOS and Cocoa, starting with explaining the basics of Objective C and using the developer tools Apple provide.

* Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone: Creating Compelling Dynamic User Interfaces (Pragmatic Programmers)

This book on Core Animation is quite good as a reference and introduction to Core Animation concepts, but it isn't a tutorial book and assumes quite a high level of knowledge of Objective C and Cocoa technologies.

* Programming with Quartz: 2D and PDF Graphics in Mac OS X (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)

Programming with Quartz is a huge guide and reference to drawing with Quartz. I'd say its essential if you're planning on doing any custom drawing in your applications.