Learn Cocoa Programming Using Objective-C

The Free eBook from CocoaLab

From the gang at cocoalab.com is the FREE eBook “Become an XCoder”. A collaboration between Ben Altenburh, Alex Clarke and Philippe Mougin, this free pdf is a 60 page tutorial aimed at complete beginners, and despite being released in may 2006, it is still current and a worthwhile read.

For those of you who might be coming from a light coding background, this is still an exceedingly useful read, and though it covers some of the basics of programming, you can just skip on through to the heavier reading, and get complete stuck in.

The current version of the eBook has been brought up-to-date for XCode 3 and OSX 10.5 Leopard, whilst the foreign language translations in German, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic are still a step behind, being for 10.4 Tiger, but are still worth a read for those users. The book is available online or in PDF, but as can be expected, the online version is the most correct and up-to-date.

Find out more on the BecomeAnXcoder Free eBook page at CocoaLab, and if you love what you read, then give them a donation. Even a BETA version of the forthcoming iPhone SDK Development costs $24.

Video How-tos on YouTube and Elsewhere

By way of a complementary learning tool you might also want to check out the various video tutorials that have been posted both on Wonder How-To and on YouTube. Apple of course has a good selection of video tutorials available free via the iTunes University on iTMS, but those are for more seasoned developers but definitely still worth checking out. Elsewhere there are videos sold as part of the iPhone SDK Development series from Pragmatic Programmers, but at $5 a pop, there is little point in buying them, given the same or similar videos are available online for free

Get Coding …

So what are you waiting for? Get stuck in, start learning Objective-C and before you know it you will be writing application for the OSX desktop and iPhone / iPod Touch.