Cocoa tutorial 0: Starting

Intro

First of all, sorry for my buggy english, I’m catalan and I have my english a little bit rusty 🙂

So, do you want to learn Cocoa programming, right? well, if you have started looking around, probably you ill have found several advanced tutorials, some more easiest, or some confusal… and probably you are thinking what I thought at first… oh jesus! what a mess!

I have found VERY confusing information about programming in mac. All what I found are very basic tutorials, and very high-level tutorials, almost nothing for intermediate users.

This is the reason that made me do this tutorials, to add one more resource to you, lost soul! 🙂

I’m not an expert, one month ago I didn’t know anything about mac, cocoa, objective-C and all this crap, and I decided to do this tutorials for me also, because writing is algo a good way for remembering things… but… forget all this, lets go for useful information!!

First of all, I recommend to learn C language, this is a must.
Then, go for Objective-C. Objective-C was the language used for a company caled NextStep, creators of what we know now MacOSX. This is the reason that all the “classes” of Cocoa start with the same 2 letters: “NS” (like NSObject – NextStepObject).
Once you know the basics of Objective-C, then I suggest you to study some of this tutorials.

Tutorials and useful links

With this one, you can learn A LOT, it has tons of information about Cocoa, and it is very useful at all levels, because starts from the basics. The problem of this page is also its advantage: It has too much information, and you probably will spend hours and hours reading things that probably you already know. If you know a little about programming, and specially something about programming with classes, then I suggest you to read only the chapters that talk about cocoa.

Very good information about Cocoa programming (catalan) – Guifi.net
Quick (and not bad) introduction to Objective-C (catalan) – Guifi.net

This is the official Apple guide for cocoa. The links above are a translation in catalan of this official apple documentation :P.

Cocoa Fundamentals – Apple.com

With this tutorial you will learn quickly, it is a good short book where you will learn the basics of cocoa. I think that the reading of this book it’s a must. The authors: Bert Altenburg, Alex Clarke and Philippe Mougin.

Become an Xcoder – Cocoalab.com

The Model View controller theory, a must read if you plan to code cocoa apps.

Molderview Controller – Cocoalab.com

This page is very useful too, with lots of examples.

Learn Cocoa – Cocoadevcentral.com

Cocoa wiki with some information.

Cocoadev.com

With this tutorials you can practise your skills, it does not have much theory, and goes directly of what we are looking from: do apps! (in catalan).

Xcode/cocoa tutorials (catalan) – Noveo.org

Here you can find some information about objective-C (and also a little about C) (in spanish)

Objective-C (spanish) – macprogramadores.org

NEW! Here you will find a podcast with VERY GOOD tutorials with itunes integration, really impressive!!