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: Andrew Merenbach <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 26 May 2008 10:57:51 -0700
Quoting Erik Buck <email@hidden>:
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 ?
Maybe we can establish a standard distribution of learning time
required. Just having a basis to set expectations might help future
newbies.
Hi,
I started at a young age with BASIC and C, and worked my way into
AppleScript after that on pre-Mac OS X systems. It was a little bit
of a jump to get into AppleScript Studio, but it made me appreciate
how beautiful Mac OS X programming could be. Unfortunately, AS Studio
was not sufficient for what I wanted to do (that is to say, grow and
properly refactor my code), and after noticing how much example code
Apple and others had provided, I jumped into Cocoa by modifying
samples and patching together my own ideas from them.
It was not an easy road in some regards -- memory management, although
now second-nature to me, took a long time to get right, since I had
*not* done much C prior to my Cocoa experiences -- and the MVC
paradigm took a long time to get used to. Overall, though, I'm glad
that I persevered -- and just for the record, I was able to get my
first "experiment" in Cocoa up within a day or two, even if its
purposes have been lost to history and even if its code would make any
novice cringe.
How long did it take me? I'm still learning, and it's been something
like six years; from "newbie to competent" probably took about four
years, before I stopped making some really basic mistakes. Was the
time investment, hours and hours a day sometimes even, worth it?
Absolutely. I have grown to love Objective-C and Cocoa more than any
other language or framework that I've ever seen on a computer.
I feel bad, though, for the people on this list who had to put up with
me in the early and even the intermediate stages of my learning. I
may have worn out my welcome, or I may not have, but I'm trying to
give back now in the hopes that I can assist others. I know how it is
to be a newbie!
Cheers,
Andrew
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