Re: Beginner with Cocoa

FROM : Jeff LaMarche
DATE : Mon Mar 24 13:12:03 2008

On Mar 24, 2008, at 12:44 AM, Sherm Pendley wrote:

> The main thing you'll have to watch for: Objective-C 2.0 has garbage
> collection available, like Java and scripting languages you're
> familiar with, but it's off by default, and earlier Macs don't have
> it. You'll probably have to learn the old way, "retain and release,"
> which is unique to Objective-C.


I'g be rather surprised if the Cocoa books took out discussions of 
traditional objective-C memory managements in their next releases. 
It's still available for use, and as you mention, necessary for 
writing to earlier versions of the OS, not to mention for programming 
that thing that we're allowed to talk about programming for here.

The only reason I might discourage someone from buying the older books 
is not that they've become valueless, but merely because if the person 
is relatively new to coding, they might find the radical differences 
between the screenshots taken from the old IB and older versions of 
XCode / Project Builder to be disconcerting and hard to follow using 
the current tools. That won't be a big deal for an experienced 
programmer who wants to brush up on Cocoa, but for someone who doesn't 
have much experience under their belt, having things be in different 
places could be quite frustrating. I'm sure some of the books, as an 
example, show how to create your controller class source files from 
IB, which is no longer recommended.

Also, just personally, I'd be upset if someone recommended to me a 
book without mentioning that that book was only a few months away from 
a new edition being released.

But all that being said, most of the information, especially the 
conceptual stuff, in the books available now is still valuable and I 
apologize if I implied otherwise.

Jeff