It’s been almost two hole days with Aaron Hillegass’ Cocoa Book and I’m about three quarters of the way through it.

This book is what I have been looking for to help guide me into Cocoa after several weeks of just trying to figure it out on my own. Now with Hillegass’ foundation, I think I can easily move on learning just by looking at the regular Apple docs.

I want to note that this is the first tutorial/learning type computer book covering an environment that the sample apps actually do some amazing things. Before being halfway through the book, I had a pretty sophisticated sample app that had document saving/opening and full undo/redo support. More amazing was how easy it was to do those things. The total amount of code for that project is 150 lines of code that do the work. ( I’m cheating and not counting the code on the model or the header files, but they are quite small ).

Building the GUI with Interface Builder is initially a little awkward, but I’ve gotten used to it and can operate pretty quickly. I think it’s very ironic that Interface Builder is quite possibly the least intuitive application on my Mac. Considering the amazing intuitive applications that get built with it.

All-in-all, I’m very impressed with Cocoa and the tools used to build OS X applications. I’m going to get my app started this weekend and report on it’s progress and my progress through OS X technologies over the coming months.