I‘m getting to a point where I think I need to start to learn how to put together ’proper' mac applications. Cocoa seems to be the way to go and from what I have seen, the environment is as good as it gets, but heck this is quite scary territory for me - real programming not just scripting?!

I suspect cocoadevcentral will quickly become my friend.

Apart from that and apple's documentation, any suggestions for good material would be hugely appreciated. (NB I have only ever done Javascript, PHP, Lingo coding).

SteamSHIFT out

EDIT: From a macslash post:

What you really should read, and in this order

This one:
Programming in Objective-C (Paperback) [amazon.com]

Then this one:
Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (2nd Edition) (Paperback) [amazon.com]

Then this one:
Cocoa Programming (Paperback) [amazon.com]

Then this one:
Core Mac Osx And Unix Programming (Paperback) [amazon.com]

Oh, and learn this one while reading the others:
Version Control with Subversion (Paperback) [amazon.com]

And you probably want to learn this as well:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596 001614/">Learning Carbon (Paperback) [amazon.com]

/EDIT