It's practically impossible to know Cocoa inside and out. There was once a discussion between two programmers about Cocoa's large APIs: one was a veteran Perl programmer, the other a Cocoa programmer. The Perl programmer grumbled about the intimidating and verbose Cocoa APIs, saying there was simply too much to remember. Bemused, the Cocoa programmer retorted: "You don't remember Cocoa; you look it up!"

The point the Cocoa programmer was trying to impress upon the Perl programmer was that understanding object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts and the architecture of the frameworks is more important than remembering the wordy and numerous method and class names in the Cocoa frameworks.

This book is a compact reference that will hopefully grow worn beside your keyboard. Split into two parts, Cocoa in a Nutshell first provides an overview of the frameworks that focuses on both common programming tasks and how the parts of the framework interact with one another. The second part of the book is an API quick reference that frees you from having to remember method and class names so you can spend more time hacking code. This book covers the Cocoa frameworks—Foundation and Application Kit (AppKit)—as of Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar).