Learn Cocoa

I just stumbled upon Learning Cocoa, an interesting post at Engineering Hints that provides advices for beginners wanting to learn Cocoa. As a first step, the author suggests starting with our Become an Xcoder booklet:

The first stage is to go through an excellent short PDF manual called Become an Xcoder. This really does require no prior knowledge of C, C++ or any other language that most manuals assume the reader has. It gives the reader sufficient knowledge to understand what is happening in all the different sections of a project as well as working with basic classes such as arrays or strings.

The book is free and is published under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You can download it (PDF) or read it online and comment on it in a dedicated Wiki at CocoaLab.

The project was started by Bert Altenburg and inspired by his famous AppleScript for Absolute Starters guide. Alex Clarke, of CocoaLab, joined us to write the book and also took on the duty of editing it.

By the time you read this, the book should have reached its 80,000th download.
The original version is in english and, thanks to the work of Mazen ArRammal, Maria Shinoto, Nobuatsu Sekine and Shiva Huang, we now have translations in the following languages:

• Arabic
• Japanese
• Simplified Chinese
• Traditional Chinese

We haven’t updated it yet for Leopard’s Xcode 3, but most material is still relevant. March 2008 update: the book has been updated for Leopard and Xcode 3 (see this post).

In addition to the resources reviewed in the Engineering Hints post I’d like to point out that F-Script proves to be a useful tool for learning Cocoa, in conjunction with the Xcode toolset. F-Script provides an interactive environment where one can type snippets of Cocoa code, have them executed immediately, and visualize results. All without having to create a complete program and generating output. This interpreted environment also includes a set of tools allowing inspecting and manipulating live objects graphically. This lets you explore Cocoa and quickly experiment with APIs or algorithms you are working on.

This is also an efficient and fun way to learn programming. Rob Abernathy wrote about this way of using F-Script:

Since I’ve downloaded and installed F-Script, my 7 year old son has been working through the tutorials for F-Script. Has been having a great time with it and is learning a great deal. F-Script is a great tool for teaching programming.

Finally, Cocoa programmers of every age will have a lot of fun and learn a lot by browsing the wonderful Cocoa Literature List created by HyperJeff.

This is the entry point for a world of articles, tutorials and books about Cocoa technologies contributed by the developer community over the years. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Not only that, but it also comes with a great content search system. Check it out, it is full of gems!

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