This is a book for the Ruby programmer who's never written a Mac app before. Through this hands-on tutorial, you'll learn all about the Cocoa framework for programming on Mac OS X. Join the author's journey as this experienced Ruby programmer delves into the Cocoa framework right from the beginning, answering the same questions and solving the same problems that you'll face.

Together you'll build a single application that threads throughout the book, and it's not a toy. You'll cover topics that may not be the flashiest parts of Cocoa, but they're ones you'll need to know to create robust, feature-rich applications for yourself. And you'll learn more than just Cocoa and RubyCocoa, you'll get first-hand effective agile development practices. You'll see test-first development of user-interface code, little domain-specific languages that take advantage of Ruby features, and other Rubyish tricks.

At the end of the book, you'll be ready to write a real Mac OS X application that can be distributed to real users.