I know that you want to start writing the code and creating games as soon as possible. If you just can't fight this feeling, then skip to Chapter 4, Rendering Sprites, and continue reading the book from that point. The rest of the book uses a purely practical approach.

Then, after some time or even after completing the whole book, you can return and read this skipped chapter. However, I believe that spending some time now and not skipping this chapter will help you to get the ideology of Cocos2D, understand some under-the-hood concepts and get a deeper understanding of the practical material in the rest of the book.

If you decided not to skip, then let's move on.

It is hard to review a seasoned framework, library, or a project's source code. Even if you have decades of experience in software development, when you take a first glance at a project that has evolved over several years, you don't quite understand why things are done the way they are. The answer is pretty simple...