On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 10:57 PM, john darnell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > And, what I hear from this august crowd is a consensus that the > references are difficult to understand, but necessarily so--that they > ought to be that way.
That's not really it. It's not that they should be difficult to understand. Indeed they *aren't* difficult to understand... once you have all of the prerequisite knowledge. And yes, having all of the prerequisite knowledge presents a pretty big chicken-and-egg problem when you're coming at the reference documentation fresh off the street, as it were. But since they aren't intended for that situation, that's to be expected. Imagine picking up a dictionary for a foreign language you don't speak, say, French. (If you speak French, imaginez une autre langue.) This dictionary is going to be essentially useless for you. Every word is defined in terms of *other* French words! Even if you can somehow slog through that, it still won't teach you all the grammar concepts you need to know. It may have definitions for the words "verb" and "noun" but it's not going to give you conjugation rules or explain finer points of grammar. And yet this very same dictionary will be quite handy for someone who speaks French. That it's useless for you, a non-speaker, doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it, you're just using the wrong tool. You want a book on learning French. Once you get up to speed to where you can speak and understand the basics of the language, the dictionary will become extremely useful. Until then, looking for help in the dictionary is the wrong move. So it is with Cocoa. If you don't know what a delegate is, the reference documentation is the wrong place to find out. Mike _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
