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Sunday, December 21st, 2008 at 3:50 PM

These last few weeks, I’ve been teaching myself Cocoa to learn what makes Mac OS X and iPhone OS apps tick (not just for Flicks, but other software, too). While Objective-C is quite a departure from my usual web development world, Cocoa has quickly become one of my favorite languages, as it takes care of much of the drudgery of pure C and has plenty of useful frameworks to get your application up and running quickly. Here are some of the best resources I’ve found so far:

• Cocoa Dev Central and Become an Xcoder are both excellent tutorials for beginners, written in a clear, straightforward manner. They also explain the ins and outs of memory management, which is critical on platforms like the iPhone and iPod touch.
• Stanford’s CS193P lecture notes and examples have proven to be one of the best resources for learning Cocoa, particularly for the iPhone. These notes and tests offer Cocoa Touch in bite-size chunks, with a little bit of “on your own” work to ensure you know your stuff before moving on.
• Google Code Search is a good last resort for examples of how others are using a small bit of code or a particular class. For more accurate results, append “lang:objectivec” to your search string to narrow results to only Objective-C code.

If you already know Cocoa, feel free to share your go-to places for information in the comments!

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