Comments on: Get started with Programming Basics: the first step to Cocoa… C++

By: Slippers

Slippers — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 10:56:30 +0000

JCR you sure are a crotchety curmudgeon! And you’re totally wrong about all things IT too! Recommending Kochan – oh whoa. Place yourself immediately in the low end of the IQ spectrum. Googling your name turns up someone with a profession of reading RSS feeds all day long and commenting on everyone else’s blogs for hours at end – you’re on cocoadev too which is a real laugh and there you’re ornerier than anywhere – you can’t possibly have gainful employment or if so actually produce anything of merit. All you produce is bile; I reacommend all blogs block you categorically and unconditionally.

Of course all the above was posted in jest and very lighthearted as opposed to the style of “jcr”.

By: John C. Randolph

John C. Randolph — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 08:04:02 +0000

What is up with this crazy blog app? In my first sentence above, the double plus signs vanished, which completely changes the meaning of what I was trying to say. It was correct in the preview, and then broken when I hit the Submit button.

I must say, if this is what DHTML is all about, I’m not impressed.

By: John C. Randolph

John C. Randolph — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 07:59:52 +0000

Umm.. It’s not April first yet, is it?

Ok, then.. C is a detriment to the beginning Cocoa programmer. It’s a horribly complicated language which encourages terrible programming habits, and sets an expectation of complexity that often stands in the way of understanding the Cocoa frameworks.

For someone new to programming altogether, I recommend learning the Objective-C language with Stephen Kochan’s book. It’s the only one I know of that treats Obj-C as a whole language, rather than assuming prior knowledge of C.

To get started with Cocoa itself, Aaron Hillegass and Bill Cheeseman both have excellent books. Aaron’s book is the text that he uses to teach his beginning Cocoa seminar, and Bill’s book is a series of small projects, a cookbook approach.

-jcr

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 03:43:52 +0000

I did a search and couldn’t find anything that applied to the raw beginner, so any suggestions are appreciated, especially if they are mac centric.

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 03:10:12 +0000

Is there a suggestion for a resource for beginners learning Objective-C?

By: Glenn

Glenn — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 23:46:38 +0000

For whatever reason, this website removed the plus plus from before the C in my post above. The only time I meant to use a C by itself was in the phrase “It might be helpful to learn C first,”

By: Glenn

Glenn — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 23:44:17 +0000

As a programmer with a decade of commercial C under my belt, I’m a bit flabbergasted by the idea that you should start to learn Cocoa by learning C . The primary language of Cocoa is Objective-C, and the only similarities between C and Objective-C is they are both descendants of C, and they are both object oriented languages. C is not simpler than Objective-C, quite the contrary, and is probably harder to learn for a pure beginner. So, you are advocating learning a complicated language whose concepts and syntax do not match up with the simpler language you eventually want to learn. Madness.

If you want to develop in Cocoa, start learning Objective-C. A lot of perfectly useful little applications can be put together graphically in Interface Builder with very little actual code, so you can wean yourself into writing more and more lines of code.

It might be helpful to learn C first, but not hugely so. Later if some future project forces you to learn C , you’ll be surprised at what an ugly hack of a language it is, surviving purely on its legacy codebase.

By: Jason Terhorst

Jason Terhorst — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 18:14:57 +0000

They can be a little tough, if you’re not into the heavier math concepts. If you want something that’s easier to grasp, you might try the C for Dummies books. There’s a bundle package book on Amazon.com for $30, I believe.

Ah, I found it: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0764517953/ref=pd_sim_b_5/104-2097000-1093541?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 13:37:39 +0000

This tutorial assumes the user already understands many concepts and presents a broad overview only. If you’re not great with math, you’ll great left behind quickly. Sorry, I’ve been out of high school math for 25 yrs, so his brief discussion of binary, octal and hexadecimal numbers left me behind at the first paragraph.

To me, it seemed more like he was showing off his smarts than to really try to lead the user through a practical tutorial. Guess I’ll have to look elsewhere.