Re: Docs
Re: Docs
- Subject: Re: Docs
- From: "R. Tony Goold" <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2001 23:05:46 -0400
I'm inclined to agree with Searle. I see a lot of 'RTFM' comments which
seem inappropriate given the context, and I find it upsetting given the
pretenses we have of a friendly Mac community. I think it's easy for the
more experienced programmers to forget how flustered beginners can get,
and even for other recent beginners to not realise what intuitions they
have from platforms other than the Macintosh operating systems of the past.
Sure, newbies should not be posting questions like "how do I get the C
string representation of an NSString?" because the first thing they should
do is look at NSString's docs where they'd find it spelled out very
clearly. Unfortunately, the things we want to do are rarely so atomic that
a single class suffices, and it can be frustrating hunting through
numerous pages of documentation for the first time just to finish a single
line of code.
What's missing from the documentation, for which they can't be really be
blamed, is a task- or scenario-based approach to the frameworks. I'm
afraid I haven't read Learning Cocoa so I don't know how well it addresses
this issue, but the Vermont Recipes are certainly a good source.
Many Carbon programmers have been living in the dark ages of procedural
programming, so they're faced with not only a new set of APIs but a whole
new style of programming. Personally, I think one of the first things a
Cocoa programmer should be introduced to is how to use distributed objects
and notifications for communicating with the AppKit thread! Learning
common examples of how classes collaborate is a good introduction to the
frameworks, in my opinion, and not one that is covered by the
documentation. A class listing with a one-line synopsis for each class
would make a great start. I found it very useful for learning Java and the
Swing frameworks.
Cheers,
Tony
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: Docs
- From: "Todd Heberlein" <email@hidden>