Bruce over on WarpedVisions writes on entering the world of Objective-C and Cocoa development.
I’m barely past square one, but I found this an interesting title. Of course, what Bruce means is the whole Mac OS X development experience, but it’s interesting that he worded it in the title as learning Objective-C. It’s a simple, concise yet technically inaccurate way to label the knowledge. ((And I’m not intentionally picking on Bruce here. I have said it this way, and probably will again, and he does get it right in the text, as he noted below.))
Objective-C just might be the easiest part of Mac OS X development. The hard part is simply knowing what objects are available in Cocoa, where they are, and how to string them together. Basically, the typical framework problem. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still at the very bottom of the learning curve here!
Objective-C itself is very nice; it’s a truly minimal extension to C. I’m amazed at how it’s still a very complete object-oriented language yet so simple and small, with everything done the simple way.
When I first started with Cocoa, I was thinking of compiling notes together so I could write a short book/essay on “Learning Cocoa for C++ developers,” but as I’ve gone I’ve realized the first chapter should be “Forget everything you know about C++. You think need ___ to do ? You do in C++, but in Objective-C just use the Cocoa class.”