Learn Cocoa

Made it through the Spiderworks book on C just fine. Made it halfway through the Apple book, The Objective-C Programming Language... and then… my eyes started to glaze over.

I think the real reason is, I need practical experience with this stuff—the C book had exercises I could do, and most of the chapters I even grasped most of it without the exercises, but I think there’s only so far I can go through these foreign concepts without actually seeing them in action. I’m sure this makes a ton of sense to someone who’s been programming for a while, but I have passed the point of comprehension.

I’m not stupid. I can figure this out. I just need to come at it from a different angle.

The only question is whether to go back to Kochan’s book and hope that the extra reading will help me comprehend faster, even though I’m somewhat dreading the text-only tack he takes; or to plow headfirst into Hillegass’ book which will excite me more because it actually deals with Cocoa and graphical interfaces, and hope that my enthusiasm will carry me through the tough bits.

Do I really need to have a firm grasp of the ObjC language before I tackle Cocoa? ...or since I’ve got a decent handle on C (and at least read the Apple ObjC doc, if not quite grokked all of it), will that be enough to get me going with Hillegass’ book?

Any suggestions?

I’ve been meaning to learn Mac programming with Cocoa for two years now, and finally am getting off my ass. Since the first of the year, I’ve gone through Spiderworks’ “Learn C on the Macintosh” eBook. Just finished that last night, now I’m starting Apple’s PDF doc “The Objective-C Programming Language,” and then after than I plan to hit “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X” by Aaron Hillegass.

Last year, I tried to start out with Stephen Kochan’s “Programming in Objective-C,” but for some reason, I burned out on it pretty quick. I’m still not sure if the book was too dry for me, or if I was just burning out on so many other things at work, I just didn’t have the energy to commit to it. I’m sure I’ll revisit it once I’ve plowed through my current book list, when I’m thirsting for more info.

I’m looking at going to the Cocoa Bootcamp at the Big Nerd Ranch in May. From the reviews I’ve read, it seems like it would be well worth my while, and cut a lot of “self discovery” time off my learning experience. The only question is whether or not I can afford it.