Learning Cocoa

Six years ago this month, O’Reilly Media released my book Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, a big revision and rewrite of the original Learning Cocoa book that was assembled from Apple documentation. For 2002, it was a great introduction to Cocoa and I’m proud of the work I did on it. However, a lot has happened in the last six years. Project Builder gave way to Xcode. Core Data, Core Animation, and lots of other tasty APIs have come out. And more recently the Objective-C language and runtime has been undergoing some pretty decent evolution, including the addition properties, garbage collection, and more. The book is more than showing its age at this point.

I considered revising the book several times over the years, but it wasn’t to be. For more than a few years, the Mac development book market wasn’t exactly a star performer for the publisher. Recently, no doubt thanks in large part to interest in iPhone development, that seems to have changed. Earlier this year O’Reilly approached me about revising the book. This time around, I decided to pass—at least for the time being. I’ve got a whole group of fantastic photographic endeavors that is totally filling my mental bandwidth. It wouldn’t be fair to myself, the publisher, and potential readers to attempt to revise the book on a deadline with my current workload. Of course, just because I passed doesn’t mean that the book is dead. O’Reilly may move forward with a revision by somebody else or may undertake other related projects as they see fit. They have my full support in whatever they decide to do.

No matter what happens with Learning Cocoa, the good news is that there’s an incredible amount of activity in the area of providing great starts to Cocoa programmers. By no means is there a vacuum in this space. Aaron Hillegass has revised his book twice and now offers the 3rd edition of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. I’ve always recommended Aaron’s book in addition to my own effort and have been happy to see that Aaron has been able to revise his material over time.

Also, and this is very exciting to me, the Pragmatic Programmers are making a big entrance onto the Mac development scene. Daniel Steinberg—who I’ve collaborated on many projects throughout the years—is writing Cocoa Programming, A Quick-Start Guide for Developers. Daniel actually tried to get me to write this book a few times for the Prags, but I’ve stuck to my guns about my photography projects and instead will serve as a reviewer for his work. In addition to the book, Daniel will be joining up with Bill Dudney to offer a three day Cocoa Studio produced by the Pragmatic Studio in late October in Denver, Colorado. I’ve been a long-time fan of the way that Mike and Nicole Clark run the Pragmatic Studio and I’m sure that this will be a great three days for those that go.

I’m super happy to see this activity happening. In a way, I do wish I could be more involved in this space right now. But, knowing that there’s good things happening in this area goes a long way to alleviating any pangs of the heart that I might have. For those people that are picking up Cocoa for the first time, there are great options that exist now and which are coming. I’m looking forward to seeing how Daniel’s book evolves as he finished it up. And, truth be told, I’m more than a little tempted to fly out to Denver myself in late October to check out the new Cocoa Studio. It might sound a bit sentimental, but it kind of feels like a torch has been passed. I can’t wait to see what happens next.