I have built some basic apps for iPhone and Mac with a general understanding of Cocoa, but haven't had a detailed understanding. Now I want to go deeper.
I have just finished the Objective-C documentation at MacDevCenter. It was great to get in-depth look but took far too much time, specially because a lot of it is conceptual, and it's hard to build detailed examples to make use of the concepts.
Now I am on to Cocoa, but feel like it would be too much work to go through 250 page documents for Cocoa itself, then KVC, Cocoa Bindings, and Core Data.
Would I be better off at this stage picking up a good book on Cocoa (Hillegass' is too sparse I think) or should I just bite the bullet and go through the docs?
Best Answer
Apple's documentation is generally excellent. The API reference in the very least is some of the best I've read (right up there with Java's API reference), and is a very valuable asset. I'd suggest reading the overview pages for topics you're interested in to get a general "feel" for how they work and a starting point, and then just start writing code. You can refer to the documentation to fill in blanks that you encounter while writing code.
Writing a small project to exercise your use of APIs you'd like to learn is a great way to get started.