macOS Tips to get your head around Objective-C

[MorphingDragon]

I have a bit of a problem, mainly biting off more than I can chew.

I started learning Objective-C as my father's work is moving to Mac OSX and needs their in house apps ported. I got promised University Accommodation fees will be paid if I port, maintain and give support for the Apps. But, my only Programming knowledge is only Visual Basic... 6, and the Lego Robotics stuff. I bought the Aaron Hillegass book thinking he didnt assume that the reader had C experience like the For Dummies book... So I was wondering if theres any... any material anywhere that has the basics of Objective-C for the non-C minded? Or Equivalent.

 

[GorillaPaws]

I highly recommend "Programing in Objective-C 2.0" by Stephen Kochan. It assumes no prior programming knowledge, but it has a lot of depth and will be useful as a reference for even experienced programmers.

 

[DeepIn2U]

I highly recommend "Programing in Objective-C 2.0" by Stephen Kochan. It assumes no prior programming knowledge, but it has a lot of depth and will be useful as a reference for even experienced programmers.

Thank you much for the suggestion. I did a quick googlie and found it for purchase in PDF format. Also noteworthy is a dedicated forum here ...

http://classroomm.com/objective-c/

& also Training from the Author

URL just in case ...
http://classroomm.com/training/training-events/programming-in-objective-c-3-days.html

Lastly check the section for web seminars; especially for ...
Getting Started with iPhone Programming:
^ in the link above.

 

[skochan]

Thank you much for the suggestion. I did a quick googlie and found it for purchase in PDF format. Also noteworthy is a dedicated forum here ...

http://classroomm.com/objective-c/

& also Training from the Author

URL just in case ...
http://classroomm.com/training/training-events/programming-in-objective-c-3-days.html

Lastly check the section for web seminars; especially for ...
Getting Started with iPhone Programming:
^ in the link above.

Hey, good luck with everything, and thanks for posting all those links. The forum is a great place for learning. You'll find the members there are extremely helpful.

Cheers,


Steve Kochan

 

[scootaru]

Here is a decent little guide, more-so for introduction to C, but it also gets into Cocoa and Apple's development suite, XCode. It is quite dated, but effective IMO.

http://www.cocoalab.com/BecomeAnXcoder.pdf

Edit: The guide assumes you know nothing.

 

[mdeh]

I have a bit of a problem, mainly biting off more than I can chew.
I got promised University Accommodation fees will be paid if I port, maintain and give support for the Apps. .......... So I was wondering if theres any... any material anywhere that has the basics of Objective-C for the non-C minded? Or Equivalent.

There is only one book, IMHO, and it has already been mentioned. Steve Kochan's book, "Programing in Objective-C 2.0". If you are really going to get paid your Accommodation, then you owe it to those who are paying you to do a good job..again, just IMHO. It will take you a week, maybe 2 Max, with your background to get through it, and your basic understanding will be solid.

 

[MorphingDragon]

Ive ordered the Steven Kochan Book, I plan to read both though. It cant hurt getting two points of views for different things.

Thanks.

 

[MorphingDragon]

Ive read 2 chapters of Steven's book. Its a lot more Newbie friendly. But I would recommend people getting both Steven Kochan's and Aaron Hillegass' books. Read Steven's first but Aaron's has useful information and little tips that are useful for any programming language.

 

[GorillaPaws]

Ive read 2 chapters of Steven's book. Its a lot more Newbie friendly. But I would recommend people getting both Steven Kochan's and Aaron Hillegass' books. Read Steven's first but Aaron's has useful information and little tips that are useful for any programming language.

I think you'll find Part II of Kochan to be the most useful to an experienced programmer. It walks you through the Foundation Framework classes which will be your bread-and-butter for writing Cocoa programs.

 

[hhas]

I have a bit of a problem, mainly biting off more than I can chew.

Well, at least you realize you've dropped yourself in it. That's a start. You should also be aware that learning ObjC/Cocoa alone won't make you a competent application developer if you aren't already, so if you don't already have a good understanding of general software design principles, abstraction, and all that other stuff, you'd best start acquiring those too. Bear in mind that unless you're a natural/genius, becoming a competent programmer is not something you do overnight. (e.g. I'm self-taught myself, and it took me a few years of writing lots and lots of really bad code and a few disasters to get halfway decent at it.)

Other folks will point you to good ObjC/Cocoa books, but personally I'd recommend the following as essential reading material:

• A good high school-level Computing Science textbook, if you've not already done so.
• Steve McConnell's Code Complete (a terrific guide to developing software)
• The Daily WTF (a terrific guide to how not to develop software)

Also do some online research on general considerations and issues involved in doing Win-to-Mac ports. You give no indication of what the existing applications are developed in, size of existing codebase, or even what they do. If they're all cleanly written in a pre-.NET version of VB, maybe you can read the code well enough to port it; OTOH, if they're some baroque VC++/MFC construction, you probably won't last five minutes if you don't already have those skills under your belt. (And if they are VB, perhaps you should be looking at realBASIC, not ObjC, as the best porting path.)

To be honest, my impression from your post is that you most likely don't know enough about what's involved, in terms of the project requirements and/or the tools and skills needed to have a decent chance of carrying it off. If that's the case, I would suggest making your excuses before you get yourself in to the point of embarrassment, and get some decent education under your belt first (both software and business). While the offer of money now must be tempting, there will always be other programming jobs in future.