Re: Getting started with cocoa
Re: Getting started with cocoa
- Subject: Re: Getting started with cocoa
- From: John Nowak <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 07:52:27 -0400
On Apr 12, 2004, at 5:03 AM, mmalcolm crawford wrote:
>
If you need an introduction to C programming, this does it from the
>
perspective of Obj-C:
I suggest getting a book on C first, as having a firm grasp on working
on things from the angle of creating functions instead of objects its
worthwhile (critical even). In addition, a time will come (I guarantee)
when you'll need to work in just plain C (crap that rhymed), or at
least read plain C source code. There's also a lot of stuff regarding C
that I bet that book passes up on (making use of case fallthrough (yes,
its a good thing!), giving a proper library function reference,
explaining pointer arithmetic (useful at least so you can read source
code from others, etc). Of course, I never read it... just guessing.
:-)
Wow I'm using a lot of parenthesis in this email.
The best book for C programming is "C Programming: A Modern Approach"
by K.N. King, hands down. Buy it, read it, love it. It's great. It
doesn't assume much, and it gets very detailed without getting opaque.
As with all programming books, the newer the edition, the less time you
spend check errata online to make sure there's no bugs in their code,
so do try and pick up the latest edition.
Again, I highly recommend that book. It's such a great reference too,
and you'd be silly not to have a proper C library reference around.
For Objective-C books in particular, I recommend you get both Cocoa
Recipes for Mac OS X and Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish, et al.
You'll -need both- of them. The former will give you a stupidly easy
intro, and while it says it builds a lot of real world
Objective-C/Cocoa abilities, I'm not so convinced. The latter will fill
in the gaps, and serve as a great reference. There's very little it
doesn't cover. The only thing its missing is specific things that only
a small amount of people will have to worry about (for example, writing
an app that makes direct use of the coreaudio framework to do audio
synthesis, etc).
I know that's three books, but hey, what the hell, you only live once.
Depending on how serious you plan on getting, you might be able to skip
the Cocoa Programming on and the C Programming: AMP (funny acronym),
but I really don't suggest it. Knowing C very, very well is much more
important than knowing Objective-C anywhere else except Mac OS X. Cocoa
Programming you might not need if you don't plan on hauling out the
serious Cocoa power, but Cocoa Recipes doesn't even tough on things
like outline views, and forget it if you want to do something that
isn't as simple as a drag and drop in Interface Builder.
- John Nowak
www.johnnowak.com
[demime 0.98b removed an attachment of type application/pkcs7-signature which had a name of smime.p7s]
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