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Learn by doing...
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Learn by doing...


  • Subject: Learn by doing...
  • From: Don Rainwater <email@hidden>
  • Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2004 16:24:06 -0400

This is kind of a long-winded testimonial, so if you're not interested in such things, move along. ;-)

I've been thru several Cocoa programming books over the last couple of years. Each of them has been useful and interesting, and the examples/tutorials have helped me gain familiarity with Xcode and Interface Builder. I have a background in system administration and programming (going all the way back to my high school days - anyone remember RSTS/E? VMS?), but object-oriented programming was new to me, and all of the books helped a lot with OO concepts. The problem was that I didn't feel that I really *understood* what was going on. I could type in the examples and watch them go, but I still hadn't figured out anything.

Recently, I had a need to automate a billing task for our print management system. The manual way involved a lot of database queries and moving CSV files into Excel, then applying formulas and formatting it all by hand. This was fine for the job when it was new, since a lot of it was changing with each iteration of the billing cycle. But, now that the process is mostly 'set', it was time to move on to something better to get the job done. So, I decided to put it all in a Cocoa program.

That decision has really changed my level of understanding about Cocoa. I've had to define my own classes to hold and work with data records, use array controllers and bindings, set up a shared user preferences controller for various things (fonts, sizes, colors, etc., so far), add an additional framework to my project (for MySQL access), and several other things. I'm tackling printing now, and trying to decide if I should format the views on-screen and print those, or create separate print views off-screen.

My point is this: If you're new to Cocoa and really want to "get it", find a program to write. Go thru the book(s) first to get the concepts down. But, IMHO, you won't really understand it until you take your own programming problem and implement it in Cocoa yourself. I still consider myself a Cocoa "newbie", but I no longer feel like a beginner. Subtle distinction? Maybe. But I think it's an important step.

Oh, and thanks to everyone who has provided helpful responses to my questions over the last several weeks.

--
Don Rainwater
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