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Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X is indeed a good book, but it assumes that you know C. If you don't know C, then there will be quite a few places where you will get lost. After looking around for some resources for you, the online manual Learning GNU C seems to be pretty extensive. Once you learn C, then you can pick up The OpenGL Superbible to learn OpenGL.

Just to prepare you, this will not be a quick learning process. Even once you know the basics, if you want to make a complicated game you're going to need to know a decent amount of other computer science concepts such as data structures, basic algorithms, etc. You will also need to be careful about resource usage including memory, OpenGL resources and the like. However, if you're willing to stick with it, and truly enjoy programming, it can be very rewarding in the end.

I suggest The C Programming Language by Kernnighan and Ritchie.

Learning C is really the Rosetta stone for progressing beyond being a BASIC hobbyist.

One important thing to know is that you don't need to use any mac-specific coding.  You don't need to learn Cocoa or Carbon or interface builder or anything to start programming in C.  HERE'S THE RUB:  Create your projects in XCode as standard tools.  They will use the terminal for standard input and output.

This is important as your next step in gaming would be to learn OpenGL, and you can use the OpenGL utility library (GLUT) to design your user interface.

Then you will eventually want to learn Cocoa/Objective-C for that mac look and because its basically brilliant.

Yes, they will compile fine in XCode.  You don't need to run them from the terminal, but they will automatically open a terminal window.

When you learn C, you can then learn how to use Apple's libraries to do Window based I/O.

EDIT: Mind you, XCode can be intimidating enough, the trick is realizing you can ignore about 90% of the crap it shows you, and basically choose your text file, edit it, and hit the compile-and-run button.

Last edited by Metacell (2009-03-16 4:33 am)

I found this helpful for getting my feet wet
http://www.cocoalab.com/BecomeAnXcoder.pdf

That second part usually ends up being the prat I have trouble with.

It's easy to drag stuff around the UI, put it where you want it, make sure it looks like a Mac app. But I usually fail when it comes time to link the interface to the code. I don't know why. I've followed examples word for word and still failed to get it to work.

Then there's the countless times Apple changes the interface of the two programs so old tutorials still refer to parts of the program that have been moved elsewhere or renamed and don't look anything like the screenshots do now.

I come from a VisualBASIC background. In VB (At least the last versions I used, which were a Windows 3.11 full copy of VB 1.0 and a lite personal version of VB 6.0) all I had to do was arrange the stuff on the window, and double-click it to open its subroutine list. Add the code in for the Click and DoubleClick and MouseOver etc subroutines and run the program and it worked. But in Xcode, I can't just double-click an element in IB and have it open the corresponding functions list in Xcode. There was no linking in VB. The elements had a predetermined set of subroutines already attached and ready to fill.

Jasoco will start the next Bungie! YEAH!

http://marathon.bungie.org/story/scrapbook.html

...Alex Dropped his cereal bowl in the sink, jogged down to the campus bookstore and skulked up to the register with a copy of Think C. He returned home to his Macintosh, determined to do whatever was necessary to become a one-man wrecking crew in the software industry, He agonized over what he would name his company, finally settling on “Bungie” because “it sounded fun.”...