Re: Beginner with Objective-C was Re: scanf...?
Re: Beginner with Objective-C was Re: scanf...?
- Subject: Re: Beginner with Objective-C was Re: scanf...?
- From: Ondra Cada <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 17:27:45 +0200
Erik,
On 10.4.2006, at 17:10, Erik Buck wrote:
I actually disagree with many who say it is not necessary to
thoroughly understand the C programming language before learning
Cocoa. However, we may all be talking at cross purposes, and we
may even be saying the same thing in different ways.
Most probably :)
I'll try to explain myself :)
(a) IMHO, for a start, just a passing knowledge of some important
features is sufficient: for example, you don't need even to know
there are such esoteric C features like bitfields until you actually
bump into them. Heck, you don't even need to understand *structs*
until you actually first time use NSPoint or NSRange or something
like that :)
The same applies at any level, of course--you may begin learning ObjC
and write a number of nice applications far before you ever heard
there are such things as @defs or @encode, not speaking of "isa" :)
(b) there is a number of plain C features you would, in all
probability, not need for the first year of Cocoa programming or even
never: unions, quite probably those already mentioned bitfields, a
very considerable part of stdlib.
Not that I advocate for ignoring this all, the very contrary--all
should learn them! But, in due time: given one is beginning to learn
Cocoa, I would say if one takes an order somewhat similar to
(i) langauge basics (definitely sans unions/bitfields, sans
differences betwixt include<> and include"", sans specific macro
features, at this first level perhaps even sans C arrays and structs)
(ii) ObjC basics (sans @defs, @encode, sans _cms, at this level
perhaps even sans super)
(iii) Cocoa basics (a select list of most-of-used classes)
and only when these all are understood, one goes on to the other
features, then -- in my personal opinion -- one has a fair chance to
learn faster than if one first tried to grok a complete C language
with all its quirks (heck, I consider myself an expert in C, but
whenever I need to set up properly nested macros with concatenated
arguments, I have to check the docs again :)), with its stdlib (a
vast majority of which one never needs), and so forth.
---
Ondra Čada
OCSoftware: email@hidden http://www.ocs.cz
private email@hidden http://www.ocs.cz/oc
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