Re: Cocoa Books
Re: Cocoa Books
- Subject: Re: Cocoa Books
- From: "Lawrence Sanbourne" <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 18:06:52 -0500
I agree -- pages like the one you mentioned aren't helpful to new
people. I think one thing Apple could do that would help is to have a
VERY prominent document that documents the documentation. In other
words, explain the differences among conceptual guides, programming
guides, and class references, so that users can benefit from them
more. While they're at it, it would be neat if Apple included links to
other help resources such as www.cocoadev.com and
www.cocoabuilder.com.
As I've become more comfortable with Cocoa, I've realized that what's
changed isn't so much my knowledge of Cocoa APIs as my ability to find
answers to my questions faster. Part of that has to do with having the
(awesome) naming schemes internalized, but a lot of that is from
spending lots of time banging my head against a wall until realizing
that I could have searched the Cocoa-dev archives at
www.cocoabuilder.com to find the answer.
Larry
On 4/17/06, Phil Faber <email@hidden> wrote:
> On 11 Apr 2006, at 00:19, Jonathan wrote:
>
> > To me, there have got to be a bunch of folks here who could
> > competently
> > write a great "Cocoa For Dummies" book in a flash, which would
> > include the
> > Objective-C we need, as well as the step by step Cocoa instruction
> > at the
> > same time, help all of us stupid, inexperienced n00b's get into the
> > most
> > exciting set of tools for Mac (I'm very excited...), help the Mac
> > community,
> > do good for all us Mac users by broadening the accessibility of our
> > tools to
> > a wider audience — and maybe make a hell of a lot of money, just as
> > a bonus
> > for being so nice.
>
> It seems to me that the book most newbie's would find most useful is
> one that answers the question "How can I achieve <x>, <y> or <z> in
> Cocoa?".
>
> Newbie's don't want to be told that "The NSMutableString class
> declares the programmatic interface to an object that manages a
> mutable string—that is, a string whose contents can be edited—that
> conceptually represents an array of Unicode characters. To construct
> and manage an immutable string—or a string that cannot be changed
> after it has been created—use an object of the NSString class."
>
> ... they want to know "How do I stored a string of characters in my
> program and then make changes to that string?"
>
> As a relative newbie myself I know the pain I went through (STILL
> going through!!) searching through books & on-line resources trying
> to figure out how to do really simple stuff like:
>
> - Opening a text file and reading from it
> - Displaying some text
> - Asking the user and questions and getting the answer
> - Sorting a small batch of numbers
> - Joining two strings together
> ...etc
>
> Back in the days of BASIC it all seemed so simple! Cocoa is
> fantastic ... but until there's a resource that the complete beginner
> can go to which explain how to do the absolute basics, many of us
> will continue to struggle.
>
> ...or is it just me?!
>
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