This is currently the best book out there for teaching you how to make Cocoa Apps using Xcode. Everything it does not cover: Core Data, Core Graphics (just touches on it for making one app), Animation, and DB I/O. So why do you want to read this thing? Why 5 stars? Mr. Smith takes the most patient and thorough explanation of how to make apps with Swift using Xcode of any book I have read. I have been reading texts on Cocoa since OS X was called Rhapsody and it ran on a PC using something called Green Box. If you write software for macOS every day, this book will bore you to death. This book is for the rest of us. The folks that want to get up to speed and cannot afford to go to ADC or a week long workshop. If you program in order to help you do your work ( scientist, engineer, statistician, etc.); this book should give you the knowledge and confidence to add a slick GUI to your computational tools. Volume 2 cannot come out fast enough.

This book is a great reference for using Xcode 8 to make MacOS apps. The book is nicely organized, well written, and the demos/examples are all informative and work as described in the book (this book is typo free as far as I can tell). This is easily the best "beginner" book on MacOS programming that I have read, and that's before factoring in the affordable cost of the e-book. The author keeps it as simple as possible and refers the reader to the official Apple Documentation if they wish to get more in-depth than what is provided in this text. By not getting too bogged down into details unless absolutely necessary, the pace of the book stays very conducive to learning Xcode and MacOS programming as you can make it through the examples without too much trouble. Furthermore, every piece of code in the book is explained in detail by the author so that there is no confusion about what he is doing.

If I were to have any negatives, I would say that perhaps he relies too much on Interface Builder to set customizations for the UI. I'd prefer the programmatic approach as it's easier to quickly see all the settings on items like buttons without needing to check many different menus in Xcode, but books that go too detailed in the programmatic methods of setting up/designing the UI suffer when it comes to the pace of the book and could lose or bore the readers. This book doesn't have that problem, so I think overall he made the right choice.

This is an excellent book. I highly recommend it. The author has explained 'why' on so many little questions I have had. For example: when creating an outlet from interface builder, the outlet should be marked as weak. He tells you why. Nobody else has told me why. I knew it had to do with reference counting- but we don't do that in swift, well, maybe not overtly... Anyway it was a 'OH!' moment for me. So simple. So cool. And it wasn't the only 'OH!' moment I got out of this book. There were many. Thank you so much Mr Smith!

I'm eagerly awaiting Volume 2.

I've been a hobby developer using XCode and Objective C since XCode 3. I'm hoping to complete an app to submit to the App Store, and decided I need to know storyboards and Swift.
I was lucky to find this book, it is exactly what I needed. Not only am I learning to use storyboards and Swift for OS X , I am picking up things about XCode and Mac program structure that I didn't know before or have forgotten. For example, I've known about snippets for a long time, and even tried to use them, but the author discusses snippets in chapter 3, and presents a couple for practical use, one I will use regularly.
I highly recommend this book.

I'm a newcomer to xcode/swift Mac apps programming, and an amateur. Done some coding in machine code (long ago), C and Vb. This is the best text book cum tutorial I have ever read - on any subject. Mr Smith has the knack of presenting stuff logically and progressively through the exercises. The book covers a lot of material very clearly and the exercises are all full of useful, practical stuff. His explanations cover all topics in an easily understood way and are clearly presented without unnecessary complication. I doubt there is any book that comes anywhere near as good as this one for Mac Apps, and I was really anticipating Book 2. Maybe, Nick, you could re-consider ?

This is the best Swift (or any other) programming book I have ever used. Well thought out step by step examples the work. Each new exercise build on what you learned previously. I also use it as a reference when I have forgotten something.

I learned much from this book, but it was frustrating because in two years the software had changed to the degree that about half of the book's examples are unreproducible. The author is a great writer but I really wish he updated his book. I gave it a four ranking instead of three because I did learn a lot from it.

Very helpful in getting me started with Seift Mac development