Re: High-level overview of Cocoa - thoughts from a newbie
Re: High-level overview of Cocoa - thoughts from a newbie
- Subject: Re: High-level overview of Cocoa - thoughts from a newbie
- From: Murray Todd Williams <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 13:45:20 -0500
The O'Reilly book "Learning Cocoa" pretty much does that. It get's the
reader through a simple application via Project Builder and Interface
Builder and then adds some complexities. The book is a little short,
however. It would be nice to have a book that had an entire section of
chapters on the Foundation framework, at least a chapter covering the
CoreFoundation stuff, etc. Lots of code examples doing something things
like Notification examples, distributed objects, etc.
I would also love to see better documentation on Project Builder. As a
newbie I was really confused by the sheer number of project templates
and I didn't see any good descriptions of what was really what. I'm
finally getting the hang of how PB works, but it's been lots of
tinkering around in the dark.
Another thing to be pondered would be whether to keep the book pure
Objective-C or try to cover both Obj-C and Java.
I wonder how hard it would be to write such a book. I just finished
co-authoring "Early Adopter Max OS X Java" which should hit the shelves
in December, and I'm feeling the itch to try writing a book on my own.
Come to think of it, it would be interesting to use this mailing list to
pool people's thoughts on the entire structure of the book. (What to
include, etc.)
Murray Todd Williams
On Monday, November 12, 2001, at 01:15 PM, Mario Diana wrote:
The big difference that any new book should have would be the approach.
The book should immediately, after a basic syntax introduction, jump
into using the libraries and Interface Builder. Teach a beginner to
construct a simple interface for input and output (a couple of
windows), and then get him or her writing in Objective-C all the
"compute prime numbers" toy programs. While doing this, NSArray,
NSDictionary and all the other data structures and so forth could be
introduced and explored. Along the way, a person could be introduced to
the skills needed to understand how documentation is organized, and how
to use it. (This is a lot less obvious than understanding "index out of
range" errors.)
Teach the use of libraries and how to read documentation. Let's leave
behind C, C++, and all that. After a person has learned the joy of
programming, they'll be motivated to learn that and anything else they
need.
Now, truthfully, a book like that wouldn't be helpful to me, but I
think it would help nurture the next generation of Macintosh
programmers.