Some people have said they didn't know where to start (or their
questions lead myself and others to believe that is the case).
One of the conceptual documents that I found most useful was the Cocoa
Fundamentals Guide
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CocoaFundamentals/Introduction/chapter_1_section_1.html
Even if you know OO programming (or maybe especially if you do) you
should read it to find out how cocoa uses OO. Depending on your
background it is possible that some OO concepts that cocoa uses are
the same as what you've used before but it was called AAA and cocoa
calls it BBB.
Don't worry if you don't understand everything at first, just work
with what you do. I would also suggest that after you've been
programming with cocoa a month or two you go back and read it again.
And maybe even again after that. Keep doing that until you read it and
go "yeah done that", "that too", "and that". You can download the PDF
and use Preview to read it (preview has the advantage of remembering
that last page you were on) or print it out if you learn better off of
dead trees.
As for the order of what to learn there is a good post by Chris Hanson
about it
http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/message/cocoa/2007/6/4/184167
This is similar to the path I've taken and it works (actually, still
in the Cocoa Bindings part and haven't had a reason to start Core Data
at this point).
Just for those who may need some help finding the conceptual
documentation (obviously most people on this list know this but I
thought I'd state the obvious for those just firing up Xcode for the
first (or second) time), first on the API pages there is usually
(thought not always) an item at the bottom of the box in the upper
right corner called Companion Guide that deals with the info for that
API.
In general the conceptual docs are called guides, so you won't find
them by searching for 'conceptual'. The people on this list refer to
them as conceptual but Apple calls them guides. To look for all of
them in the Xcode documentation window select the 'Title', 'Core
Library', and 'Contains' tags under the toolbar and type 'guide' in
the search box.
The search field here is pretty basic, you only get one search term so
you won't, for example, get to search for 'guide cocoa' as it will
look for the full string not two separate strings. The google powered
search at http://developer.apple.com/ will do better but will not be
limited to the titles, for example.
I don't have a CS degree and would qualify, as one poster deridingly
called early mac programmers, as a hobbyist. I have approached
learning cocoa seriously and actually study it; via the documentation,
books, open source code, example code, programmer blogs, this lists
archives, creating test projects, and working on a full application
(slowly, this all comes out of my spare time after all).
Yes it would be nice if the docs could explain every api in exactly
the way that I am going to need to use it but that is not realistic.
At this point I am confident that for most any cocoa (or even non
cocoa) api I can use it from the api reference and the guides when I
need to. Things really do start making sense.
Anyway, interesting thread and sorry for rambling.
--Nathan
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