In the last year Apress has invested a lot in books on iPhone and Mac development. Their “Learn” series shows you how to learn C, Objective-C (there’s even a book to re-educate Java developers to Objective-C) and of course they’re the company behind the highly successful book “Beginning iPhone Development”.

I’m a big fan of Apress books as I find they offer very good value for money. I visit the Apress site on regular basis to check out upcoming titles on iPhone and Mac development. There was one book that was announced quite some months ago, but the release date kept slipping and slipping.

That book is the one I’d like to review today and it’s called “Learn Cocoa on the Mac”.

First of all, I’d like to point out that this book does *not* cover iPhone development. This is about Cocoa and Mac applications. Of course, with Cocoa Touch being a subset of Cocoa, you will recognize design patterns that you use on the iPhone and of course topics like Core Data can be used in both Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.

The chapters in this book are:

1. Must love Cocoa
2. Hello, World
3. Lights, Camera… Actions!
4. GUI Components
5. Using Table Views
6. Cocoa Bindings
7. Core Data Basics
8. Core Data Relationships
9. Search and Retrieve Core Data with Criteria
10. Windows and Menus and Sheets
11. Document-Based applications
12. Exceptions, signals, errors and debugging
13. Drawing in Cocoa
14. Advanced Drawing Topics
15. Working with files
16. Concurrency
17. Future paths

I’m not going to go through all the chapters in detail as the titles are clear enough.

You can see that the base of subjects is *very* wide and that is what makes this book a really great one. I find the explanations of the subjects and the samples really great. I felt really comfortable and got more confident going through this book, occasionally going through chapters very fast because of my knowledge of Cocoa Touch.

The nature of this book is really great. We all know that there are dedicated books on subjects such as Core Data and graphics. However, “Learn Cocoa on the Mac” does a great job of giving great introductions and clear explanations of what is going on. It goes deep enough into its subjects to make you understand what’s going on.

I love this book. I had great expectations of it and it didn’t disappoint. This goes easily in my personal top 3 of Cocoa books.