Recently, I have had several people come to me asking for advice about Mac programming. A few of these have experience in web standards and Flash/Flex/Air development, while others were in the Java/C++ crowd, and the last guy was just getting started with no experience at all.

The fact that I have had so many approach me, with almost the identical question raises a very valid point. Just where does one find the best documentation and sample code to get started in Cocoa development? With so many developers making the switch to iPhone and then the Mac (and hopefully Cappuccino for web), I think this post will only gain value as time goes on.

So I have compiled a list of extremely useful resources. If you spent enough time googling, you would certainly run across these sites yourself. However, I’m saving you something very precious: time. These vary in range of beginner programmer to advanced genius, so there is a little something for everyone. Keep in mind that as of writing this, official publications on Objective-C 2.0 are just barely in print, and anything for iPhone is still in the works, as the NDA keeping publishers from releasing books was just lifted a week ago.

• THE doc on the Cocoa language, from Apple, HTML or PDF
• http://developer.apple.com – Great place to start for tutorials, etc in general
• http://cocoablogs.com/ – List of all the top Cocoa developers blogs
• http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl – THE Cocoa message boards
• http://forums.cocoaforge.com/index.php – Another great Cocoa forum, more advanced
• http://inexdo.com/CocoaNav – Wonderful little piece of software for viewing Cocoa headers (information on classes and heirachy)

The finale comes with “Cocoa Programming Mac OS X 3rd Edition“. It assumes very little programming knowledge and yet contains a good 80% of what you need to know when designing a full Cocoa programming. Key design concepts are explained in great detail and it is a wonderful resource.

If you have anything to add to this list, please leave a comment on this post or send me an email!