Ebook: Step into Xcode: Mac OS X Development

I'm most of the way through this book and have been losing interest since the first chapter. This book suffers from 3 fatal flaws: incomplete instruction, nonexistent trouble shooting, and poor code design. The first is very frustraiting, if you learn by doing and try to write the code in the book instead of just looking at the included code, you will quickly find your code does not work because the author omitted entire functions from the book. When learning to walk you will stumble, good intro books should account for that and provide you with the means to pull yourself up. This book provides no help to handle problems and you will make many, with the incomplete information along with the general disconnected nature of objective-C & cocoa you, like me may find yourself spending most of your time with this book debugging rather then learning. Finally as a veteran programmer in Win32, Linux, & embedded systems, I found the author's software design sensibilities to be lacking. Functions seem shoved in to classes for little reason, simple data objects took on complex IO functionality; these poor practices are touted by the author as examples of good Mac programming.

In summary I cannot recommend this book, its shortcomings make it difficult to work with, and these difficulties make it nearly impossible to learn from this book.