Books to learn objective-C for an experienced programmer

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass is great for learning Mac programming.


My favorites are:

  • Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, I have the 2nd and 3rd editions.
  • Cocoa Programming by Daniel Steinberg
  • Programming in Objective-C 2nd edition by Stephen Kochan. The 2nd edition adds the Objective-C 2.0 features: garbage collection, properties, and so on. I am not yet sure I like his approach of explaining just Objective-C (barely touching the Cocoa frameworks) because, even though Obj-C can be used without Cocoa, that'd be very unusual. However, it's a good book on the language itself.

Also, it's not in print yet, but Cocoa and Objective-C: Up and running (http://cocoabook.com/), by famed cocoa blogger Scott Stevenson looks promising as well, I've purchased access to the beta and is as good or better than his posts. I also have (had) Cocoa Design Patterns, but unfortunately lost it in the train :(, so I can't honestly recommend it yet, but I liked the first chapter. I will buy it again, if that counts.

Links edited because of spam prevention prevented me posting them.


To learn objective-c specifically -- not Cocoa or Cocoa touch -- I have and like:

Programming in Objective-C 2.0 (2nd Edition)

Programming in Objective-C 2.0 cover

The reason that I like this book is because it doesn't assume extensive knowledge of C. Of course, knowing C -- or any C like programming language will help. But this presents Objective-C as Objective-C the programming language and not Objective-C the extension to C. I think this is important because C and Objective-C have different ideology. Yes, they share attributes but programming in C is a different experience from programming in Objective-C. Your book should reflect that. :-)