Re: Guidance for Cocoa's steep learning curve

FROM : Michael Ash
DATE : Fri May 16 16:31:52 2008

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 10:19 PM, john darnell
<john.<email_removed>> wrote:
>
> Sigh.  Your attitude reminds me of a conversation I once had with a
> fellow programmer.  When I was encouraging her to add more documentation
> to the code, she replied, jokingly, "If it was hard for me to write,
> then it should be hard for them to read."
>
> The sad thing is that you are not joking...


I don't think you quite understood what I'm getting at.

Apple's documentation does its job quite well. The "problem" with it,
such as it is, is that it is not a tutorial. If you're learning a
system from scratch, you don't want and can't really use straight-up
documentation, you want a tutorial.

Apple's tutorials pretty much stink. They're short and quick and cover
very little. This is an area where they lack quite a bit and, luckly,
third parties have leapt in to cover the hole. If you're having
trouble getting up to speed then it is this lack which is getting you.

But it is unreasonable to expect the NSString reference documentation
to cover basic concepts about the framework. That's not what reference
documentation is for.

Mike