Preface

In May 2009 I made first contact. For the first time in my life, I was subjected to the Mac OS platform and started learning Xcode, Objective-C, and cocos2d. Even for experienced developers like me and my colleagues, it was a struggle. It was then that I realized cocos2d was good, but it lacked documentation, tutorials, and how-to articles—especially when compared with the other technologies I was learning at the time.

Fast-forward a year to May 2010. I had completed four cocos2d projects. My Objective-C and cocos2d had become fluent. It pained me to see how other developers were still struggling with the same basic issues and were falling victim to the same misconceptions that I did about a year earlier. The cocos2d documentation was still severely lacking.

I saw that other cocos2d developers were having great success attracting readers to their blogs by writing tutorials and sharing what they know about cocos2d. To date, most of the cocos2d documentation is actively being created in a decentralized fashion by other developers. I saw a need for a web site to channel all of the information that’s spread over so many different web sites.

I created the www.learn-cocos2d.com web site to share what I knew about cocos2d and game development, to write tutorials and FAQs, and to redirect readers interested in cocos2d to all the important sources of information. In turn, I would be selling cocos2d-related products, hoping it might one day bring me close to the ultimate goal of becoming financially independent. I knew I could make the web site a win for everyone.

Then, within 24 hours of taking the web site live, Jack Nutting asked me if I had considered writing a cocos2d book. The rest is history, and the result is the book you’re reading right now.

I took everything I had in mind for the web site and put it in the book. But that alone would have amounted to maybe a quarter of the book, at most. I hope the five months in 2010 I spent writing the book full-time paid off by being able to provide an unprecedented level of detail on how cocos2d works and how to work with cocos2d.

I learned a lot in the process, and even more so during the many months updating the chapters to the second and then the third edition. I wish nothing more than for you to learn a great deal about cocos2d and game development from this book.

What I learned from writing about cocos2d is that I can provide a solution for cocos2d that removes most of the initial hurdles for cocos2d developers. The result of that is Kobold2D, which you’ll find an introduction to in Chapter 16 and of course on www.kobold2d.com. What sets it apart from cocos2d is that it has an installer, all the documentation, bundles the important libraries, has ARC enabled, over a dozen example projects and additional features on top of that. Obviously one of my goals for the third edition was to make it 100% compatible with Kobold2D 2.0.

Steffen Itterheim