Rating: 

I have bought a couple of Cocoa programming books and, superficially, this one is the best of the lot. The examples are real, working applications and not code snippets. Moreover, they often involve "cool" features like graphics, integration with the BSD layer, and Mac-specific things like the pasteboard or Services.

The exercises are also emotionally satisfying because you quickly get something that looks pretty; often after doing one I run to my S.O. saying "look at this!"

Unfortunately this is also related to the first of two flaws with the book. The coverage is very superficial; the exercises are all recipies where you type in the magic code, click "run" and ooooh! Look at the pretty pictures! They don't explain how the "magic code" works in any detail, or tell you what to do if you get runtime errors instead of pretty pictures.

And runtime errors are what you'll often get. The second, and most crippling, flaw with this book is that it is riddled with errors; typos, inaccurate information, missing steps, hand-waving non-explanations of important concepts. I have consulted the 18 pages of errata for the book, and still about half the time the application doesn't work right when I run it. The errors are usually things like missing environment variables, conflicting line endings or character encodings, differing system preferences, or other such machine-specific stuff.

The book should cover debugging in more detail. It should have a section on using GDB. The examples should have steps where you validate your configuration against what the authors are expecting. The "magic code" should include error checking. If the second version includes this, it will be the masterpiece this one should have been.