macOS Unorthodox transition to Objective-C

[Macula]

I have a project coming up that involves Mac development—something I've never done before.

I am an experienced programmer in old platforms—have done quite a lot of object-oriented programming in Pascal, as well as scientific programming in Fortran. In the past I was doing small projects in the Win32 environment (that was way back in the early 90s). I have also done some assembly programming in (again) older platforms (Intel x86).

My problem is that I have a fragmentary and rather rudimentary knowledge of C.

My question: How difficult would it be to pick up Objective-C?

Let me say once again that I understand object-oriented programming, but my knowledge of C/C++ syntax is limited. Are there any particular tutorials for my case? Any advice?

Thank you.

 

[Stratoukos]

Well a good thing is that most of the stuff you'll be doing in Objective-C is on a higher level, so you don't need an excellent understanding of C. This is a good tutorial for C++ that you can read in less than a day, to get a feeling of the syntax and the language constructs. If you are familiar with programming in general (you seem to be), this is a short tutorial for Objective-C that will walk you through the syntax of Objective-C as a language.

Of course the hardest part will be learning the frameworks and generally the way mac applications are developed, but Apple has very good documentation.

 

[Macula]

Much appreciated, Stratouko!

 

[GorillaPaws]

Here's a good C tutorial for the Mac.

There are several great tutorials at Cocoa Dev Central.

Here's an Objective-C primer from Apple.

And here's Apple's full guide to the Objective-C 2.0 programming language.

You might want to buy Steven Kochan's book "Programming in Objective-C 2.0". It's well written, and will be a useful reference, but it's written in a way that makes it accessible for first-time programmers. Given your background, it may move too slowly for you, however the entire second half deals with the foundation Cocoa classes which will be your bread-and-butter of Cocoa programming.

 

[Muncher]

You might want to buy Steven Kochan's book "Programming in Objective-C 2.0". It's well written, and will be a useful reference, but it's written in a way that makes it accessible for first-time programmers. Given your background, it may move too slowly for you, however the entire second half deals with the foundation Cocoa classes which will be your bread-and-butter of Cocoa programming.

I agree. It's a great book for core concepts, syntax. After that you may want to get a book on the Cocoa library specifically, as there's a lot there. Everything can be found online at Apple, but it's not organized as well as a book might be.

 

[GorillaPaws]

I agree. It's a great book for core concepts, syntax. After that you may want to get a book on the Cocoa library specifically, as there's a lot there. Everything can be found online at Apple, but it's not organized as well as a book might be.

Yeah, Hillegass' book would be the next logical step. I didn't mention it because the OP was asking specifically about the Objective-C syntax.

 

[Macula]

Many thanks to all. I have already gotten down to work and so far it's been going smoothly.

The Hillegass book on Cocoa will indeed be my next step.