Objective-C. Where should you start? Here, of course!

This book will show you the fast track to learning Objective-C and some of the more important/pertinent classes and functionalities in Foundation Kit, Apple's core application framework used by Cocoa and OS X at large.

The book is novel in that it does not require use of XCode or understanding of Apple's proprietary developer tools. This approach yields a means of explaining Objective-C that is brief and can be covered in about 25 pages. It also puts you on the fast-track to understanding how the language works.

Whether you are either an experienced Objective-C application developer, a Foundation Kit daemon author or a newbie, you will be surprised at the useful descriptions of Objective-C used in this book.

Projects start with "Hello World" and rapidly expand to managing unix interfaces, implementing trivial object-based threads, using the runloop and NSTimers, using NSPipe to read output from unix commands. NSArray, NSDictionary and NSString are also covered as crucial building blocks of applications in Cocoa.

Is this a reference book or a tutorial? It is neither and both. Enjoy.