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A great place to start ... 
This book is really spot on if you have no Cocoa experience. I find that as I progress with Cocoa I really don't use this book much. The first 10 chapters are really good. I feel like some of the chapters in the middle go on and on and on. It's very difficult to make examples that are compact yet informative, but for the most part the book achieves that. Worth a read for sure. The AmaZone app example is great, although you'll have to make an extra NSURLConnection call to [...] to get your request signed before sending it to amazon.com.
Not for beginners 
Despite the accolades by some, this is not a book for beginners. To learn programming you need lots of examples, lots of exercises in a defined problem space (so you can solve them! and learn...) and good explanations not only of what a particular feature does, but what it is for and how to use it, practically, and in your own programs. This book fails on all these criteria. Further, some of the examples don't work, and they are so complex that a beginner is baffled as to where even to start looking to fix them.
If you don't know Objective C (which was my situation - my background was self taught programming in C and the GEM GUI on the Atari Falcon) or even don't know C, Steve Kochan has written an excellent book, "Programming in Objective C 2.0", on these issues and also on the Foundation Kit. His book satisfies all the criteria mentioned above. We need him to write a similar book on Cocoa. Don't waste your time, or your money, on Hillegass.
After spending several fruitless months on Hillegass's book, I found free help elsewhere: my friends, the sad news is that there is no avoiding reading Apple's guides to XCode and Interface Builder, and above all, the Cocoa Fundamentals Guide, and dipping into other guides, as necessary. I recommend working through Apple's Cocoa Application Tutorial (much to learn there) and Apple's sample programs in the Image Kit Programming Guide (even more to learn, not just image-kit specific stuff) - and note that these programs DO work. The Wikibooks "Programming Mac OS X with Cocoa for Beginners" is another excellent tutorial, with excellent explanations. I also found the Cocoa tutorials by Julius Guzy (start at: [...]) to be invaluable. These have the great merit of focusing on just one topic at a time - so if you stuff up, as invariably happens sometimes, you have a defined problem space which, yes, you can indeed solve with some ingenuity and perseverance, and learn from having solved.
Strange and Difficult 
I did a lot of research before buying this book, and the overwhelming accolades seemed to assure me that my [...] bucks would be money well-spent. Personally, I feel very let down by it. The way the author jumps into code without explanation, routinely giving you half a page of calls with absolutely zero previous discussion of what they do or where they come from, is both baffling and frustrating.
Most of the exercises are conducted with a tone along the lines of "Just do what I tell you and it'll make sense later," which doesn't suit my learning style.
Much of the book is focused on multi-chapter projects, which can be problematic for someone who has a project in mind and simply wants to learn how different aspects of Cocoa work.
Also, the text really fails at answering any questions you might have about anything. Seriously, if you have a question in your head, you will never find the answer unless you muddle through the assignment. The book has a tendency to never talk about anything in particular with any depth, and only explains things in as much as they apply to the current example.
For future editions, here are some recommendations:
1) When you introduce a new object, give us a list of methods near the beginning of the chapter, so we aren't constantly guessing what you're talking about. There are times when every new line of code feels like a surprise.
2) Cover some basic things that actual people want to know. Here's a big one: "How do I open and parse a file?"
3) Take it easy on the line drawings. They sometimes make things seem a lot more complex than they actually are.
4) The cavalier handling of Bindings is often infuriating. I've re-read sections literally a dozen times without figuring out why things are bound to this thing instead of that.
Anyway, that's just my two cents. This book is decent, and it will tell you how to do a LOT of things, but you really have to earn it. It's a textbook, and it expects you to follow a course from beginning to end. If you're not willing to do that, you really shouldn't pick up this book, as it will drive you nuts.
Also, once it starts getting into writing code, you have to be patient enough to roll with it when you're confused. For me, the book left so many unanswered questions while I was working through it that I was almost perpetually filled with angst over things. I'd rather learn one thing at a time, learn it well, and move on to another thing.
Overall a good book, worthy of getting as a primer for Cocoa Programming
I own this book and worked through it fairly diligently. Having come out the other end of the book, I would say it provides a good foundation for continuing on, but I don't think this book is enough to start writing your own apps without some more assistance. I think it *almost* gets you there, but falls short in a couple of areas. I think if you buy this book with the intention of picking up one or more additional books to continue on, then this book will serve it's purpose, but I do think if you try and start programming just from this book, you'll be a bit lost when your done. I myself picked up Cocoa Design Patterns, which seems like a good next step so far. It provides a LOT less hand holding, but if you've gone through Hillebrands book, you should be ready for that anyway.
I think if I could sit down with Hillebrand and make any recommendation it would be to either have put more into this book, or break it up into 2-3 books, with some additional details along the way. In many cases as I diligently typed in the code examples I was often somewhat lost as I went along. Some things became more clear as the book progressed, but others remained somewhat murky. For instance the chapter on drag-drop. There was a lot of code there, and not a lot of explanation. I see that there is a follow up book to this by him coming out in July, which I intend to purchase, and I recently bought his iPhone book, which while I haven't gone through it in detail appears to be improved over this in it's flow, or perhaps it's just that I know more about Cocoa in general that it's not overwhelming me.
I can't say how difficult this book would have been without extensive OOP experience, but if your considering this as a starting point for programming, don't. This book, Cocoa itself is *not* for beginners. I would say you really need to cut your teeth with some general OOP concepts and put your time into programming them before you try and tackle Cocoa. PHP could be a pretty good way to build up your knowledge. It would allow you to learn programming and OOP while not getting bogged down with having to try and tackle interfaces, messaging etc. If you do already have oop experience, but don't know Objective-C, it's certainly different than other OOP languages I've used (Java, C++, PHP) but it's more syntactical than anything else. This book provides a decent primer on Obj-C and by the time I got past those primer chapters I was pretty set with regard to Obj-C itself.
I did really like this book. I have a good foundation on Cocoa now and while I am still in need of more books to start filling in the gaps and continue on my journey, this served as a good start for that, and I would most definately recommend this book. You should definately goto the book website and download the example/source code, I found on some of the challenges that I didn't figure out, it was helpful to see his examples and then move on, rather than spend time trying to find the needle in the haystack, at some point you do need to punt and move on...
It's worth mentioning that while I'd say 80-85% of what he talks about re: the Interface Builder was still relevant, this being from 2008, the IB has changed with the most recent version just enough that when I started this book as a complete newbie, I got stuck in a couple places until I could gather the knowledge to understand where his instructions were no longer accurate. In the end for me some googling solved my hickups. So for anyone starting with this book and using XCode 3.2 or newer, know that you'll find a few things work differently, and also know that once you see what you need to do differently and understand it, the differences are pretty minor, it's just when your totally new and don't know the IB well enough, it can seem impossible at first. A little perseverance will get you through. It would have been nice if the author had provided a bit more updates on his website about the differences, he gave some info, but it was pretty cursory.
FInally, even with my criticisms, I want to say I didn't intend the criticisms to be reasons not to get the book, but rather heads-up about where you would need to find other resources to keep you chugging along, and also to say that as good as this book is, I do think additional more advanced books are required afterward to ensure you move along on your journey.
Good for experienced programmers
I used to do some programming about 10 yrs ago in C++ and I thought that I was fairly good at it. Well, here I am, now 10 yrs later, and I've forgot a lot of concepts and ideas with C++ especially pointers. Anyways, now I'm on a Mac and thought it would be awesome if I could learn to write applications since I have a growing list of things I'd like to make.
Well, I picked up this book last year and started going through it... unfortunately, my past experience didn't "come back to me" and I was lost very early on in the book. So I ended up purchasing "Programming in Objective-C 2.0" by Stephen G. Kochan because they take you from not knowing anything, to general Objective-C programming (not necessarily Cocoa). But it fulfilled my need, which was to learn Objective-C and brush up on my programming skills in general.
Anyways, now that I've gone through most of that book, I felt that it was time to pick this book back up again. It's going good so far, yes, some things are still a little foreign to me, but it helps to read it more than once and think about what Aaron is saying.
One area that I think this book lacks is in support. The website does a decent job of listing errata and Aaron does point out a couple differences between XCode 3 (when the book was written) to XCode 3.2.1 (which is the current version).
However, on his website, he has "interactive forums" which is not at all a typical forum that one would expect. It's a long list of comments that people can leave back and forth. When it comes to looking for help on a specific topic, you have to search through all the comments -- it's a huge mess.
What I have done as a response to this, is that I have set up my own forums online if anyone else wants to go through this book with me. I know I'm not too experienced with Cocoa, but I'm willing to help anyone as much as I can. The author himself is even invited to come and join if he likes.
The forums are at cocoacommunity{dot}com
Well, it seems that they've updated their forums due to me setting up mine. =(
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