My Newbie Learning Question
My Newbie Learning Question
- Subject: My Newbie Learning Question
- From: Richard Jackson <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 08:58:25 -0700
Like many others here I'm working my way through the "Learning Cocoa"
book, and have made it up through Chapter 9 (Table Views and Data Sources).
In the example code, the book introduces the "valueForKey:" and "takeValue:
forKey:" methods, which are pretty cool.
My question is not "what are they?" - the book makes it pretty clear how
the methods are used, and by reading through the headers
(NSKeyValueCoding.h) and Howard Ship's excellent writeup
(
http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/Technical/CategoricallySpeaking.html) I
can see that these methods are part of an NSKeyValueCoding "category" that
extends the NSObject class.
My question is: how does anybody find out/remember these methods exist?
I keep looking in Project Builder for some sort of "Class Browser" which
will show me all of the methods (inherited or extended via protocols or
categories) that are available to a given class: something like the
Metrowerks Class Browser or even the (ugh) Visual Studio Class View. Is
there such a thing? Or with hard work and late nights will I eventually
reach that programming Nirvana where I'll just "know" that "my class is
subclassed from NSObject, which just happens to have some cool categories
defined in this separate little .h file over yonder..."? ;-)
Do you "old-timers" actually have all these things memorized??
- Richard Jackson
P.S. I think I speak for all of us newbies when I express my gratitude to
those of you who have been so patient in answering our naive questions. For
every brave sole who ventures a question and gets a great reply, there are a
dozen more of us who are silently lapping it up.
Keep it up - please!