Re: How hard is it to learn Cocoa - Survey ?
Re: How hard is it to learn Cocoa - Survey ?
- Subject: Re: How hard is it to learn Cocoa - Survey ?
- From: Jens Alfke <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 26 May 2008 10:02:36 -0700
On 25 May '08, at 1:18 PM, Erik Buck wrote:
For those who consider themselves intermediate to advanced Cocoa
programmers, how long was the journey from newbie to competent and
from competent to advanced ? What percentage of your time did you
dedicate over how many months ?
I spent a week in an Apple training class in 2000. A lot of the time
was spent writing an expense-account application, involving the usual
text fields and table view, and then adding features like copy and
paste, drag and drop, and undo. By the end of that class I felt I
basically knew what I was doing. (As I described it to people
afterwards, I felt like I'd climbed into some kind of powered mecha
exoskeleton and was lifting girders and assembling buildings single-
handed. I was coming from Java, where building GUIs was a pain in the
butt.)
I'm not sure if I was generally "competent" after that week, but I was
ready to start putting together a prototype of my app. It probably
took another month before a competent Cocoa programmer would have
called me "competent" :) Of course I was lucky to have several experts
in neighboring offices, and the AppKit team down the hall in case I
really got stuck.
I think what made a big difference was blocking out a whole week to
just learn and tinker. It's so much easier to absorb new concepts if
you don't hear the clock ticking and feel your boss's eyes on your
back. If you're learning Cocoa, and you have a big project you've been
assigned (or are just dreaming of), then for god's sake don't start on
that project right away. Build toy apps first. Take a sample app and
play with it, adding new features or changing things around.
Humans (like all mammals) learn best through play.
—Jens
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