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Our Favorite Non-Cocoa Programming Books
Cocoa programming books are indispensable to Mac and iOS programmer, but other programming books are just as important. Let's look at some of our favorite books on programming basics and object-oriented programming and design.
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke and Don Reberts (Addison-Wesley).
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides (Addison-Wesley).
Refactoring to Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky (Addison-Wesley).
Prefactoring by Ken Pugh (O'Reilley).
Test-Driven Development by Example by Kent Beck (Addison-Wesley).
Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce (Addison-Wesley).
The Art of Unit Testing with Examples in .NET by Roy Osherove (Manning Publications). Although the examples are in C#, the principles are still relevant to Cocoa programmers too.
Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell (O'Reilley).
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin (Prentice-Hall).
Our Favorite Cocoa Programming Videos
Last but not least, we're going to tell you about our favorite programming videos. Most of them come from iDeveloperTV, partly because they are the leading provider of Cocoa programming course videos, but also because they're very well-produced by Steve Scott ("Scotty") and feature top-notch Cocoa programmers. We should point out that we have no affiliation with iDeveloperTV.
Learning Objective-C with Jiva DeVoe (iDeveloperTV). 13 hours.
Beginning iOS Development with Dave Verwer (iDeveloperTV). 8 hours.
Coding in Objective-C 2.0 with Bill Dudney (The Pragmatic Bookshelf).
Becoming Productive in Xcode with Mike Clark (The Pragmatic Bookshelf). Now covers Xcode 4 too.
Core Data with Marcus Zarra (iDeveloperTV). Almost 11 hours.
Concurrent Programming on Snow Leopard with Drew McCormack (iDeveloperTV). 6⅔ hours.
NSConference 2010 and 2011 (iDeveloperTV). Many hours of presentations by heroes of the Mac and iOS programming world on a variety of topics. 4½ hours.
The World According to Gemmell (iDeveloperTV). Five videos with presentations by Matt Gemmell (iDeveloperTV).
Our Favorite Cocoa Programming Books
Every Mac or iOS programmer needs to learn programming techniques specific to these platforms. In our last post, we showed the Apple-specific blogs that we visit the most. This time, we want to share the books that we've used the most to learn Cocoa programming. Next time, we'll share our favorite videos.
Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (3rd edition) by Aaron Hillegass and iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide by Joe Conway Aaron Hillegass (Addison-Wesley). The classic texts for learning Cocoa on the Mac and iOS, respectively.
Cocoa Programming: A Quick-Start Guide for Developers by Daniel H Steinberg (The Pragmatic Bookshelf). Nice intro to Cocoa.
Programming iOS 4: Fundamentals of iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch Development by Matt Neuburg (O'Reilley).
Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish, Erik Buck and Donald Yacktman (Sams). Despite its age (published in 2002), it still contains gems.
Cocoa and Objective-C: Up and Running by Scott Stevenson (O'Reilley).
Cocoa Design Patterns by By Erik Buck and Don Yacktman (Addison-Wesley).
Our Favorite Cocoa Developer Blogs
Mac and iOS developers have at their disposal a wealth of blog sites written by expert and successful Apple developers. Of course, there are also several blogs written by less well-known developers that still have useful information, but they tend to be updated less often. We're going to discuss the blogs that we visit the most for up to date information. In our humble opinion, these blogs provide gems that every Mac and iOS developer should know.
NSBlog- Written by Mike Ash. This blog concentrates on expert techniques for Mac and iOS development. If you truly want to know how to proceed from a noobie to an expert programmer, this is the site to visit. Mike has a book for sale on iTunes that is a collection of all of his blog posts until late last year. We strongly recommend that you buy it.
Cocoa is My Girlfriend- Written by Marcus Zarra, an expert on Core Data.
Cocoa With Love- Written by Matt Gallagher. This blog covers a variety of topics in depth, including some vital tips, and includes sample projects so you can peruse the source code.