If you are new to Cocoa, you should really start by downloading and digesting the Discovering OpenStep tutorial. This tutorial is a little out of date but it really explains how to program for Cocoa in great detail. There is also Apple's Learning Cocoa book, which I havne't seen yet, but in looking at the table of contents to it, it appears to be an updated version of the Discovering OpenStep book. You will also want the Introduction to Object Oriented Programming and the Objective-C Language, which contains a good introduction to object-oriented programming.

The best advice I thing anyone can give on really learning Cocoa is to just jump in and try to do something. I had the Discovering OpenStep book for a long time before I actually had a system I could run OS X on, and I read the book over and over. But I think this was a waste of time, since I couldn't apply or try any of it, I really didn't learn. It's kind of like trying to learn how to drive a car from a book, what you read doesn't mean much until you can actually relate it to something. For example, we have all heard the advice about steering into a skid when driving, but until you felt what a skid is, that advice doesn't mean much.

So be forewarned, there is no book that can teach you how to program for Cocoa, you need to "just do it". It's amazing what you can do without really trying hard. And the great thing is that you don't really need to know a whole lot to do things. That's the beuty of Object Oriented programming. You should be able to just use an object without knowing the intracacies of it's implementation.

Our links page has lots of links to places to get example source code and this is where you should start. Get an example program and look at the code to see how it works. One thing you will notice when examing Cocoa programs, is that there generally isn't a lot of code. The frameworks, in combination with Interface builder, provide so much of the "code" that you are probably used to writing yourself, that you look at source code and think "I just don't get it, how is it doing X, there's no code in there". While this may make it inimidating to get started, you'll really enjoy it later on when you find that something that may have taken weeks to write before, is now either done completely by the frameworks, or may be a few lines of code in a subclass.

After that, check out the articles at StepWise and our links to source code and such.