While there are several books on programming for Mac OS X, Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide is the only one that contains explanations of how to leverage the powerful underlying technologies. This book gets down to the real nitty-gritty. The third edition is updated for Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 and covers new technologies like DTrace, Instruments, Grand Central Dispatch, blocks, and NSOperation.

• C and Objective-C
• The Compiler
• Blocks
• Command-Line Programs
• Exceptions, Error Handling, and Signals
• Libraries
• Memory
• Debugging with GDB
• DTrace
• Performance Tuning
• Files, Part I: I/O and Permissions
• Files, Part II: Directories, File Systems, and Links
• NSFileManager -- Cocoa and the File System
• Network Programming with Sockets
• CFRunLoop
• kqueues and FSEvents
• Bonjour
• Multiprocessing
• Using NSTask
• Multithreading
• Operations
• Grand Central Dispatch
• Accessing the Keychain