I came at Cocoa and Objective-C after years of programming experience
with C, C++, Java, Perl, etc., etc. (My resume, for the curious:
http://www.sigio.com/~jason/resume.html .)
I found two books to be very helpful at getting me up to speed on
Objective-C and Cocoa. These books respectively are Steve Kochan's
Programming in Objective-C and Aaron Hillegass's Cocoa Programming for
Mac OS X. I read them in that order.
(I think it goes without saying that you should also do the tutorials in
the books, and don't just copy and paste the examples. Play with them.
See what changing parameters does. See if you can add little features to
the sample programs.)
Yes, Kochan's book does contain some introductory material on
programming and OO in general, and several chapters on the C roots of
Objective-C. Those sections, however, are very easily skipped without
missing anything in learning Objective-C.
The Hillegass book is a good introduction to Cocoa application
programming. It will get you started with the basic paradigms and
conventions of Cocoa. It will be helpful to have some prior programming
knowledge and knowledge of Objective-C to begin with, even though this
book contains a very basic introduction to Objective-C.
It is important to remember that Objective-C and Cocoa are two different
topics. It is hard to learn the latter without already having some
proficiency in the former. Objective-C is a programming language, and
Cocoa is a framework, or rather a series of related frameworks. I found
learning both to go very quickly given my experience. However, I studied
Objective-C first and then Cocoa.
That said, I don't think a programmer's education is ever finished. To
steal a line from the Beatles, "the more I learn, the less I know." That
is, I realize just how much more there is to learn.
So, I'd recommend anyone looking to learn Cocoa, who already has
programming experience in other languages/paradigms get the two books
listed above. I found them most helpful.
Cheers,
Jason Stephenson
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