Re: Guidance for Cocoa's steep learning curve

FROM : Andy Lee
DATE : Fri May 16 20:05:10 2008

On May 16, 2008, at 10:50 AM, Jens Alfke wrote:
> but there are still a lot of concepts and details to learn, and many 
> times their topology does not reduce to a directed acyclic graph 
> (i.e. you can't present them in order without forward references.)


Jens, I was going to bring up the concept of forward references, but I 
ran off to run an errand and now I find you beat me to it. ;)

I think this gets at what a lot of people complain about when they 
feel overwhelmed by the things they need to learn to start developing 
with Cocoa.  (There's also the issue of people trying to do too much 
too soon, as has been mentioned, but that's a separate discussion.) 
Forward references are what the concepts docs are for, but for some 
reason, they don't seem to be serving that purpose for some people. 
I'm not sure why.

With the rapidly increasing popularity of Cocoa development (as 
evidenced by the sold-out WWDC), I wonder if the market for Cocoa 
instruction will grow as well.  I don't just mean more books, as 
welcome as those will be.  I feel like introductory Cocoa is the sort 
of thing where face-to-face instruction makes a huge difference.  I 
can imagine someone taking the road maps that Erik Buck started this 
thread with (a pretty good pass at linearizing the DAG, IMO) and 
building a curriculum around them.  This could be used in a Continuing 
Education course, or in an after-work study program like some 
companies have.  People could offer video courses too.

--Andy