Re: Guidance for Cocoa's steep learning curve

FROM : Michael Ash
DATE : Sat May 17 08:56:20 2008

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 10:57 PM, john darnell
<john.<email_removed>> wrote:
> And, what I hear from this august crowd is a consensus that the
> references are difficult to understand, but necessarily so--that they
> ought to be that way.


That's not really it. It's not that they should be difficult to
understand. Indeed they *aren't* difficult to understand... once you
have all of the prerequisite knowledge. And yes, having all of the
prerequisite knowledge presents a pretty big chicken-and-egg problem
when you're coming at the reference documentation fresh off the
street, as it were. But since they aren't intended for that situation,
that's to be expected.

Imagine picking up a dictionary for a foreign language you don't
speak, say, French. (If you speak French, imaginez une autre langue.)
This dictionary is going to be essentially useless for you. Every word
is defined in terms of *other* French words! Even if you can somehow
slog through that, it still won't teach you all the grammar concepts
you need to know. It may have definitions for the words "verb" and
"noun" but it's not going to give you conjugation rules or explain
finer points of grammar.

And yet this very same dictionary will be quite handy for someone who
speaks French. That it's useless for you, a non-speaker, doesn't mean
there's anything wrong with it, you're just using the wrong tool. You
want a book on learning French. Once you get up to speed to where you
can speak and understand the basics of the language, the dictionary
will become extremely useful. Until then, looking for help in the
dictionary is the wrong move.

So it is with Cocoa. If you don't know what a delegate is, the
reference documentation is the wrong place to find out.

Mike