First of all, I do not own this book, and I have not touched a copy of it. However, I read the Chapter 6 sample and I learned such a great deal from that single chapter that I wanted to give my feedback. I have had quite a struggle trying to learn Cocoa and I have been stuck for a while now, just being confused. I have done tutorials and tried repeatedly to make sense of the Application Kit and Core Foundation documentation bundled with Mac OS X which, with my novice's naivete, I found ponderous and confusing: all to no avail. The Objective C language guide, or whatever it's called, was also difficult to understand, and I had to re-read so much that it was nearly impossible to piece it all together.
When I read the sample chapter, I was so very pleasantly surprised to find out for the first time what a mutable data class actually was (I had been wondering this for some time and had not known where to ask or find it out). And at last this book finally explained Objective C object ownership and disposal in a way that I could actually understand -- it took me a minute, but it was really exciting when I finally got it; the Objective C language guide's section on object ownership and disposal had failed me in that respect every single time. I especially found the diagrams and illustrations to be immensely helpful in clarifying and demonstrating the relationships and interactions between different objects. I feel much in agreement with another review I read: that the writing is clear and that it is sufficiently easy to understand.
If you have not read the sample chapters, I highly recommend it. The other reviews seem to be fairly accurate which say that this book is a beginning Cocoa book. But I figure that once I have the basics down (with the aid of this book), all of those scads of sample code, drawer-full's of documentation, and racks of reference material on Cocoa will be enormously more meaningful to me and should then be mostly sufficient to keep me prancing down the path of progress. The first chance I get, I will go out and buy this book!
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