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: Sherman Pendley <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 26 May 2008 13:21:29 -0400
On May 25, 2008, at 4:18 PM, Erik Buck wrote:
So this is a survey:
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 ?
Unlike the other respondents so far, I'm a relatively recent
immigrant. I was a Unix guy in a Mac shop, and in 2000 or so a friend
there who had installed Mac OS X DR3 on his PowerBook showed it to
me. I bought a Mac the next day, and learned the basics, how to
manage memory, connect things in IB, the MVC and KVC design patterns,
and so on, over the mostly-sleepless following weekend.
After that, I spent the next year or so just playing with it in my
spare time - my day job was web programming, and my employer was
still using MacOS. So it was a matter of an hour here, a Saturday
there, etc. Just poking at areas of interest that came up as I tried
different things. One idea often led to another. For instance, as
part of learning how to supply data to table views, I wrote a simple
database front-end using MySQL's C API. Once I had it supplying the
data, I noticed that it beachballed while it was fetching rows, and
that triggered an investigation of runloops, and how to use timers to
avoid blocking them.
After I left my web dev job, the learning pace picked up because I
suddenly had a lot of time on my hands. I wrote the first version of
CamelBones in about a month, using NSProxy objects to forward
messages across the bridge. Maybe six months after that, I had
mastered the runtime well enough to integrate Perl classes directly,
without proxies.
sherm--
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