Rating: 

Now that I am simi-retired, I thought Cocoa would be a good project as I am a long time Mac user, and have begun to use OS X.

This book is a good start but has some flaws. The ToDo programming example downloaded from the O'Reilly web site is buggy. The status symbols are not drawn at all.

The ToDo tutorial is somewhat complex, so much so that looking at the nib files in the example does not provide the expertise necessary to debug the project. The text leaves out vital steps such as exactly how to create the information window groupings. No mention is made of the Layout->make subviews function. The program will not run correctly without use of this function.

A second but less troublesome problem is that Apple has twice released new versions of Project Builder since the book was published. Fortunately, the new UI is relatively intuitive, but one must invest time with trial and error learning. I had hoped that sufficient information would be presented that I could not only learn object oriented programming concepts, but actually create a bug free sample program. Having compared the sample code with my own created from the text, I believe there must be more information required to create the UI with Interface Builder.

Nevertheless, the book is valuable. More information on debugging is needed. My plan is to buy another book and keep trying. I expect that revisiting the ToDo Learning Project after I have acquired more debugging skills will result in finally getting the final example to run.