Most of my posts related to programming on this site center around programming .NET using C# on Windows. Well, it looks like that era in my programming career has come to a close. I bought a MacBook Pro back in June and have been working toward starting to learn how to develop applications for the Mac. I’ve waited until now for several reasons–one of which is that the new XCode 3.0 and Objective-C 2.0 just came out with Mac OS X Leopard. As I have time, I am going to start documenting my experiences here to help others figure things out as well. I could be wrong, but with the introduction of Mac OS X Leopard, I believe the demand for Mac developers is going to rise dramatically. Time will tell.
Anyhow, while my general programming experience is very useful to me as far as logic and flow are concerned for developing an application, the Apple way of doing things is different and takes some getting used to. From what I’ve seen so far, though, is that the Apple way is also very cool. I am fortunate to work with Marcus Zarra who is an independent software developer on the Macintosh. He is helping me close some gaps in my own knowledge and so I’m going to journal the things I’m learning here from now on.
So, lets get coding…
was hoping I could start to learn programming via XCode. Figured, why not start with a tutorial. Unfortunatley, the plan here seems to be to dive right in, with nary an explanation as to why…. WHY do I even need a .m or .c or .h file to begin with ? why not throw all the code needed into a single file ?
Hey – Im a complete beginner here so there must be some reason why things got to be at this level of complexity …. or are all these strange files just a hobbled mess ?
You’re right, I do assume a certain level of knowledge for my xCode 3 tutorial. I would be glad to help you, but when you say your are a “complete beginner” do you mean you’re a complete beginner at programming or you have some programming experience and you’re a complete beginner at Cocoa programming?
If you don’t know the answer to these fundamental questions, then you probably won’t be able to start with the xCode tutorial and understand it.
– What is a variable?
– What is a function?
– What are conditionals?
– What are loops for?
– What is an object?
You can learn all of these things within the Cocoa/Objective-C context, but again I wouldn’t start with the xCode 3 tutorial.
I would start at Cocoa Dev Central. There are some good tutorials there–though they haven’t all been updated to work with xCode 3. Here are a couple tutorials I would start with:
http://www.cocoadevcentral.com/d/learn_cocoa/
http://www.cocoadevcentral.com/articles/000081.php
-Matt