The ubiquitous suite of Apple products depends on software, and serious software developers cannot ignore programming for Apple devices. Objective-C is the main programming language for Apple OS X and iOS, the operating systems installed on MacBooks, iMacs, iPhones, and iPads. Objective-C is difficult to learn and master. Learning Objective-C is the price to pay to be able to develop nontrivial applications of a high quality. This book is about programming on OS X and iOS using Objective-C, covering the most important aspects of developing an application on a Mac platform.
What I like the most in the book is the fact that it is really easy to get into it, even if you have no experience at all with Xcode and Objective-C. Sit down in front of your Mac, open the book, and the first chapters will smoothly lead you to your first “Hello World” application. Your “Hello World” project will grow as you read subsequent chapters. I have not spotted any significant difference between the screen shots given in the book and what my Mac shows me, which is something of an accomplishment for a technical book full of screen shots.
The book also goes into technical topics, such as memory management, key-value programming, and the use of the debugger. These topics are highly important for any serious programming activity.
On the negative side, the book is often light on the semantics of the concepts involved in programming with an object-oriented language. For example, the mechanism of the method lookup is not clearly explained in the book. The definition of the super keyword is not clearly presented. Your progress through the book will not actually suffer from this, as long as you already have a good command of object-oriented concepts.
Another negative point is that the book seems to favor the development for OS X over iOS. The main objective of the book is largely focused on making an application for desktop Mac computers, covering an accurate step-by-step construction of a small application. However, deploying that application on an iOS device is not easily accomplished solely by reading this text.
The book nicely gathers all relevant information for carrying out a software development project specific to OS X and iOS. Reading it will save you a lot of Googling, especially at the start.
The author has targeted the book at programmers who wish to develop on OS X. Having a general knowledge of object-oriented programming and being an OS X user are probably the only requirements for this book. However, it will not teach you about how to program. Many excellent books for learning about programming are already available. On a side note, my personal opinion is that Objective-C is far from the best programming language to start with.
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