On May 19, 2008, at 12:42 PM, Alex Kac wrote:
Every technology I've been able to get into easily because I could discover the tech in my own time. Cocoa is not like that. You have to grok the whole foundation first before you can do anything.
I don't agree with this. You have to grok it all before you work optimally, perhaps, but that's true of any language. But you will never grok it all if you don't work with it, make mistakes, etc. You make it sound like a huge catch-22 in which nobody could ever learn Cocoa without spending a year contemplating their navel first. ;)
I'm not against hard work to learn a new platform/language. Its a challenge and I love it. The problem I have is that the docs as written do not work for learning Cocoa in your spare time even if you plan to go full-time to Cocoa in the future (that's my goal - move my WinMobile dev to my other engineers and then move myself to Cocoa full-time, but I can't just drop my projects now).
I'm curious as to why you (and obviously several others) believe this is true - I'd like some concrete examples of what's preventing the Cocoa Documentation from letting you learn it effectively in your spare time. I'm not doubting you, I just think it would be interesting to isolate what the factors are that make it work for some and not others, because I learned Cocoa before Aaron's book was first published almost exclusively from the NeXT documentation in my spare time while working 60+ hours a week at a software company in the Bay Area during the height of the dot com explosion, with a wife who was working the same kind of hours at a software company, and with four kids under the age of four. Believe me, spare time was at a premium in my life when I learned Cocoa from the official documentation.
The documentation and tools today are better than they were then because so much was in flux with the whole Rhapsody / Yellow Box switchover from NeXT, there was a lot of uncertainty and more changes than the doc team could keep up with. It wasn't easy - as I stated in an earlier e-mail, I spent a lot of the first few months without a clear picture of what I was doing at times, but to say the docs "do not work for learning Cocoa in your spare time" is an overly broad and patently untrue statement. Perhaps they don't work for you, with your schedule and your way of learning, but I guarantee you that many of the people on the list learned primarily from the very same documentation you claim can't be used effectively for learning. The thing that is true (I think) is that the "big picture" is more important with Cocoa than with most other languages, so it's more intimidating to dive in and it takes longer before you get a comfort level.
Also, I realize that on many other platforms, it is common to see code samples sprinkled through the API documentation/ For example, the header of the Iterator class might show a code sample about how to iterate using an iterator. I can see how coming from that background could lead you to think Apple's API documentation is deficient. It's really just that Cocoa documentation isn't set up that way - it's more modular. To say that Cocoa doesn't have code examples is wrong. It has them - plenty of them - they're just not in the API documentation. Most classes have links to the relevant guides and conceptual documentation where the code is. It's sort of like MVC, but - there's a modularity and clear division of documentation based on the purpose it serves; once you understand the way its set up and know where to look for what you need, it's more than adequate.
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