How can I learn to program for cocoa?

You need a lot of sparetime and enthusiasm. Have fun!

You said you have no previous programming experience for the mac, but do you have other programming experience? While you can learn objective-c as your first language, you might be better off learning basic programming concepts with something a bit simpler just to get a feel for how programming works. There are a few great books out there for learning cocoa. I’ll link them when I get to my computer.

Hi guys,

Thanks for the speedy responses, I have done a little bit in the past, basic Visual Basic stuff, but really not much.

I have a particular project that I really want to get done, so I have the motivation and I am a student so I have the time lol.

If Objective-C is a really hard one to start, I guess I don’t really have to use it, I just want to make a program that can make and manipulate a simple database and create reports in the form of html files. Oh and maybe one day include reporting to twitter.

Anyway, Thanks again for all your help so far guys.

Ok, I’m back at the computer now. It’s not that Objective-C is so exceptionally difficult, but that object-oriented programming has it’s own unique concepts, so adding those on top of trying to learn programming fundamentals like loops and conditionals may be asking a bit too much. However, since you’ve got at least a basic grasp of programming concepts then I think you would be ok learning Objective-C. There’s an exceptional book out there called Programming in Objective-C by Stephen Kochan. It is an awesome tool for learning the language, but it doesn’t specifically teach you about xcode and how to integrate your code with the interface builder (apple’s tool for constructing GUIs).

There are several good books out there that teach you how to create some Mac apps using Xcode and the interface builder, but they tend to assume a bit more programming experience. So I’d recommend getting that first book, plus a second one that’s more Xcode geared so that you can learn both together. If you only do the pure Objective-C command-line type apps then you’re going to get burnt out too quickly in all likelihood, but if you skip that and go with the glitz of some of the other books by building your own GUI apps, you may wish they had a bit more instruction on the hows and whys of Objective-C once you get a few chapters in. I started to teach myself this stuff a couple years back and ended up getting too busy with other things to really pursue it properly. But “learn to be an amazing OSX programming master” is still on the to-do list, I’m sure I’ll get around to getting that done one of these days :P

Shot Answer because I have not really the time, a few links really usefull released by Apple .

Objc-C : http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjectiveC/ObjC.pdf

Cocoa : http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CocoaFundamentals/CocoaFundamentals.pdf

Furthermore you can by Oreilly’s books which are very usefull for precise point or question you can have.

from start to advanced: http://masters-of-the-void.com/

@aaron, that looks like a frickin’ awesome resource.

@robmandu, yea, i only regret i havent dug into it yet myself.

http://www.cocoadevcentral.com/ is a good site as well.