I learned Cocoa in 2002 on Mac OS X 10.1 and Project Builder (the NeXT IDE that was Xcode’s predecessor). I remember reading a brand new O’Reilly book called “

I learned Cocoa in 2002 on Mac OS X 10.1 and Project Builder (the NeXT IDE that was Xcode’s predecessor). I remember reading a brand new O’Reilly book called “Building Cocoa Applications”. It was written by two ex-NeXT devs and was quite helpful in understanding the system. Apple’s own documentation and sample code was good back then. The API was much smaller, so I read the reference for every Cocoa class. Apple provided a fully functional demo app called Sketch which showed important architectural patterns like undo/redo. When developing my first Cocoa app, I’d basically go see how Sketch.app implemented something and copied the approach. (Incidentally, I’m convinced that the well-known Sketch drawing app is basically a case of somebody looking at Apple’s Sketch.app sample code and thinking “couldn’t we just sell this.”) Some years earlier I had tried to learn Win32. It’s hard to overstate just how fun and easy and powerful Cocoa felt in comparison.