Re: Learning to program Cocoa
Re: Learning to program Cocoa
- Subject: Re: Learning to program Cocoa
- From: David Trevas <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 09:46:20 -0500
Can anyone make any suggestions on the best way of learning to program
for the Mac.
I am fairly new to programming on the Mac. I have very limited
programming experiences
My history of programming consists of Turbo Pascal, Turing and Q-basic
on the PC.
It has been sometime. I am very eager to get back into programming
though.
OOP is new to me. Are there any books on Objective C that anyone can
recommend? I definately would like to program for Cocoa.
Do you want to learn Cocoa or are you looking for the best way to get
started programming for the Mac (coming from a limited programming
background)?
If the latter and you enjoyed programming in Q-basic, then you might
like REALbasic. Having had programming experience, I outgrew RB after a
couple of months, but that is not to say that I didn't learn anything.
You'll get tangible results quickly and you'll get some object-oriented
concepts as well.
However, if you really want to program in Cocoa, the first thing to do
is to start learning C. While you are doing that, read "Object-Oriented
Programming and the Objective-C Language" which came as ObjC.pdf in your
developer documentation. I think that book is outstanding and since it
doesn't ask you to do exercises, the fact that you may not know when to
use commas or semi-colons at that point in time isn't that big a deal.
Where others differ from me is that I don't believe you need to become a
C expert to start Objective-C (especially if you are working in a
framework like Cocoa where you are spending most of your time using
stuff that pros perfected, instead of writing everything from scratch.)
It would be really great if someone could write a book teaching the C
concepts used in Cocoa and avoid the ones that Cocoa replaces. An
example of what to avoid would be a lot of the functions from string.h
that are replaced with the methods of NSString and NSMutableString.
The good news about learning C is that you can use your eventual tool
for writing Cocoa programs, Project Builder, to do your C exercises.
The key is when you open up a new project and the dialog about the types
of project you want comes up, go all the way to the bottom and under
Tools, choose Standard Tool. Couldn't they just have called it a
"Standard C Tool" and helped many people like me avoid the confusion? I
hope you learn from my struggle!
After you've gotten some C under your belt and feel comfortable with the
material in the "OOP and ObjC Book" (which may be more than one read,
but it is well-written so it's not too excruciating), you may want to
take a crack at the book called "Learning Cocoa." I believe that most
people here agree that you need at least the background I described to
really learn from it (as opposed to following instructions blindly like
a trained chimp). Good luck and I hope you will return to keep us
apprised of your progress.
Dave