Books to learn objective-C for an experienced programmer.

Question

I am an experienced C++, C# programmer on Windows platform and would like to learn Objective-C to try out developing on the Mac and iPhone.

What books do you recommend me to start out with?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK

This book gets your feet wet in all the right areas. Jeff LaMarche has a good Twitter feed too and appears to be very active in the iPhone community.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

I liked Learn Objective-C on the Mac and Beginning iPhone 3 Development. Between those two books you'll learn enough to be dangerous :)

I also started the pragprog iPhone book but preferred the Apress titles.

Answer 4

I'm reading Learn Objective-C on the Mac and find it good.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

I found this an excellent PDF when I was transitioning from other languages to Objective-C, as it compares a number of features from C++ and Java to Objective-C in a systematic manner:

http://ktd.club.fr/programmation/fichiers/cpp-objc-en.pdf

Answer 7

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

Programming in Objective-C 2.0 (2nd Edition)

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. :-)