New Cocoa Book

In the scheme of things, having an iPhone book that we can't publish isn't the biggest problem facing me -- but it is frustrating. Bill, Chris, and Marcel have written a really nice introduction to programming the iPhone and we still aren't allowed to show it to anyone. The way we at the Pragmatic Programmers* read the NDA, we don't even think we're allowed to send it for external tech review. So there it sits.* As near as we can tell, other publishers are doing the right thing as well.

Before I knew that we would have to hold off on the iPhone book, I stole the idea for an example from Chris Adamson's ten minute browser for a Cocoa book that I'm writing. Here you'll create a code free web browser in about ten minutes and then add features to it in the subsequent chapters.

I actually tried to get lots of other people to write this book before I took it on. Really I wanted James Duncan Davidson to update his book "Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 2nd Edition". I learned a lot from his approach but it is now getting a little long in the tooth. We don't poach authors from other publishers, so first I asked him if he was going to update the title for O'Reilly. When he said he wasn't I tried to get him to write a fresh book on Cocoa for us. He was sort of interested but he really wants to spend his time working on his current passion/profession which is photography.

There are other good books on Cocoa. In addition to Duncan's book, I learned a lot from Aaron Hillegass' "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X". Aaron has continued to update the book and I have replaced the second edition on the shelf next to my desk with the third edition.

The book I wanted to see published (I didn't want to write it at this point) wasn't a competitor to Aaron's but a complement to it. Where Aaron's book is more comprehensive, mine would be more of a guide for experienced OO programmers on how things are done in the Cocoa/Obj-C world. I had the pleasure of interviewing Aaron at this year's WWDC and can't say enough good things about him. He is nice, accessible, bright, generous and the length and breadth of his Cocoa/Obj-C knowledge is impressive.

I have bought a lot of Cocoa books over the years but the three that I keep close are Duncan's, Aaron's, and "Cocoa Programming" the huge definitive work by Scott Anguish, Erik Buck, and Donald Yacktman. Aaron is keeping his book up to date. There's no way anyone will revise "Cocoa Programming" and much of the information is now contained in the improved documentation produced by Apple Tech Pubs. That left the hole left by Duncan's book.

So, I decided to give it a try. One of the things I love about writing a book like this is it forces me to poke around into corners that I would otherwise just gloss over. I don't include much of this information in the book but it does give me a stronger foundation to stand on.

Duncan came to speak our Java user group in Cleveland a few years ago and gave an entertaining talk on how he'd moved from Java to Cocoa. While at Sun he had launched Tomcat and created Ant. He had worked in thie Object Oriented language for years and told us that "I used to think I was an Object Oriented bad ass 'til I came to Cocoa." I didn't understand what he met until I took the same journey.

For those who come to Obj-C and Cocoa from Ruby, the journey is very different. Much of what you've been able to do in Ruby and other dynamic languages has been available in Obj-C for a long time. Some of your favorite features may be missing -- but the transition should not be that difficult.

I don't pretend to be creating the book that Duncan could have if he had carved out the time. There are also a lot of others in the Cocoa community who I would have rather had write this book (Scott Stevenson, Jens Alfke, ...). Let me know what you think of it and, because it's in Beta, you can submit your erratta for things I should change or add.

In any case, here's my Cocoa book in progress: Cocoa Programming: A Quick Start for Developers. The first six chapters are available today and you'll get updates and corrections as I write more chapters and incorporate feedback from beta users.

* I've blogged about the line of Mac books that we are producing here on my O'Reilly blog because, although we are an independent publisher, O'Reilly is our distributor and you will be able to buy these Prag books either directly from us or wherever O'Reilly books are sold.