Title:** Cocoa in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference **Author: Michael Beam, James Duncan Davidson Publisher:** O’Reilley & Associates **Release Date: May 2003 List Price:** $39.95 **ISBN: 0596004621

Description: Cocoa in a Nutshell begins with a complete overview of Cocoa’s object classes. It provides developers who may be experienced with other application toolkits the grounding they’ll need to start developing Cocoa applications. A complement to Apple’s documentation, it is the only reference to the classes, functions, types, constants, protocols, and methods that make up Cocoa’s Foundation and Application Kit frameworks, based on the Jaguar release (Mac OS X 10.2). *See http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/cocoaian/ for more info…

*Sample Chapter for the Book: Here’s a sample chapter (Ch. 4, “Drawing and Imaging”): * http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/cocoaian/chapter/ch04.pdf * (pdf)

Amazon Link:** http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596004621 **Barnes & Noble Link: http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0596004621 *O’Reilly & Associates Link: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/cocoaian/

—-Comments—-

*MichaelMcCracken - I assume I’ll have to buy this. I love Nutshell books. *Steve Dekore - As far as I can tell, this is, for the most part, just a hardcopy of the Apple reference docs that come with the developer tools.

• A good basic reference for when you don’t feel like having 80 browser windows/tabs open to various parts of the online documentation.
• Most of the stuff in here can be found in Apple’s Cocoa Documentation pages, but a hard copy is always nice to have. I found the part on networking and Rendezvous extremely useful. Just watch out for some errors in the example code! I stumbled on quite a few of them. You may want to check out the errata page for details: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/cocoaian/errata/ *JoshaChapmanDodson - I just bought it today! It is the best quick reference book available for Cocoa! *StephaneDassieu - (read the comment above) *OwenYamauchi - if you’re trying to learn Cocoa, steer clear of this - it’s very dense and fast-paced. However, if you’ve already got the hang of Cocoa and you’re looking to broaden your knowledge about cool, little-used Cocoa classes, definitely get this book. *Bought this, found it useless for learning Cocoa and useless as a reference. Xcode’s in-built documentation suits me better. I’m afraid I cannot recommend this one.

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All of MichaelBeam ‘s articles published on O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter are available online http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/159