Re: Bypassing Interface Builder
Re: Bypassing Interface Builder
- Subject: Re: Bypassing Interface Builder
- From: Graham Cox <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 15 May 2008 09:26:12 +1000
On 15 May 2008, at 6:05 am, Julius Guzy wrote:
I have no idea how the rest of you gained your expertise but working
on my own, even with the help of books and the internet it has been
an absolute nightmare.
I imagine it can be hard without a structured approach to learning it
- there's a lot there and without a guide it's impossible to know
where to "jump in". I doubt that IB or Xcode is intuitive enough to
guess.
I recommend Aaron Hillegasse's book "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" (http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-Mac-OS-3rd/dp/0321503619/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_k2a_3_txt?pf_rd_p=304485601&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-2&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0201726831&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1BBG60H7AHDA15M6M1VJ
)
Personally I found using this book I could start writing useful code
with Cocoa and IB after about a week (simple stuff, at that stage).
That said, I did also attend a course at Apple Munich on Cocoa way
back in 1997 not long after the NeXT merger, which involved running a
very early version of the Yellow Box on Intel PCs - all a bit weird,
but again, it was a structured introduction which was a good mix of
actually using the tools like IB and lectures giving a glimpse of the
potential. It was another 5 years before I looked at any of that
again, so I'd forgotten the details but remembered some of the core
concepts. Hillegass took me the rest of the way.
It might be worthwhile attending a course if you can find one - do
Apple still run them? That can often cut through months of frustration
trying to struggle on ones own.
One problem intially was with IB itself which wanted me to drag from
controls to outlets etc. and which I found very hard to learn
You probably didn't mean what you wrote, but if you did, then you
would have had trouble - IB doesn't *ever* want you to do this. You
drag FROM outlet TO control. You drag FROM control TO target + action
method. It's always FROM source TO destination.
and books like Cocoa Programming for Mac OSX and Vermont recipes
were very hard going. Perhaps it was their verbosity, or the
learning by rote
I've already talked up this book, so I'm surprised you feel this way
about it. It's not verbose, it's concise and clearly written. You can
choose to learn by rote or you can take the underlying concepts, ideas
and principles and use those to explore other things more appropriate
to the tasks you want to accomplish. This sort of exploration may not
work for everybody, but it did for me. It's a little like doing
science - the book gives you some theory, a selection of scattered
facts, but you extrapolate from that to your own situation, test your
understanding by testing new "what if" cases and thus gradually expand
the theory and your own understanding. I personally feel that this is
the point of these books - they are not intended to give you a
tutorial for all of Cocoa, they show you a few pertinent examples and
expect you to use some induction to extend that to other parts they
don't specifically cover. I would imagine that reading Hillegasse from
cover to cover and typing in every example would be extremely dull
indeed, and I doubt you'd really absorb all that much. Instead, have a
goal of your own and use the book as a reference to explore certain
concepts then use your own project to try and apply them. Sure you'll
make lots of mistakes, and from time to time there will be
frustration, but those moments when you extrapolate from principle A
and B to guess that C and D will happen - AND IT DOES! - will make it
all worthwhile ;-)
hth,
G.
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