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How to find Apple's Cocoa documentation and samples
Apple's Cocoa developer documentation is located at http://developer.apple.com/cocoa/
On that page you will find the following links:
- Guides - http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/index.html
- Reference - http://developer.apple.com/reference/Cocoa/index.html
- Sample Code - http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/Cocoa/index.html
- Technical Q&As - http://developer.apple.com/technicalqas/Cocoa/index.html
- Technical Notes - http://developer.apple.com/technicalnotes/Cocoa/index.html
- Release Notes - http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/Cocoa/
If you have installed Apple's developer tools on your computer, most of the available documentation is already on your hard disk.
You can search Apple's documentation with the search built into the top right corner of every page of Apple's on-line documentation. Many people prefer to just search with Google.
Third Party Cocoa Books
CocoaBooks provides a list of books about Cocoa programming along with reader reviews and comments.
Other Cocoa Resources
Many resources are listed at CocoaResources. The following are of particular importance:
- Apple's Cocoa Developer Mailing List - http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/cocoa-dev
- A third party archive of Apple's Cocoa Developer Mailing List and the Omnigroup's Mac OS X Dev list - http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/ This archive is easier to search than Apple's list.
- Blogs - http://cocoablogs.com/
- Literature - http://osx.hyperjeff.net/reference/CocoaArticles.php?cat=author
- A frequently-updated list of Cocoa resources (articles, apps, books, etc) - http://cocoaheads.byu.edu/resources
Object Oriented Design Patterns
Cocoa is a pattern based framework. Many of the recognized patterns were first identified in Cocoa or its predecessor technologies, Openstep and NeXTstep. Many other patterns even pre-date NeXTstep and were first identified in Smalltalk.
The seminal text on Object Oriented Design Patterns is "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series) " by Erich Gamma (Author), Richard Helm (Author), Ralph Johnson (Author), and John M. Vlissides (Author) Additional pattern resources include
- wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern_(computer_science)
- Portland Pattern Repository - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Pattern_Repository
- Design Patterns in C# and VB.Net - http://www.dofactory.com/Patterns/Patterns.aspx
- Design Patterns in Java - http://www.patterndepot.com/put/8/JavaPatterns.htm
- Another rehash - http://www.exciton.cs.rice.edu/JavaResources/DesignPatterns/
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