Re: How hard is it to learn Cocoa - Survey ?

FROM : James Merkel
DATE : Mon May 26 23:22:02 2008

On May 25, 2008, at 2:21 PM, Erik Buck wrote:

> So this is a survey:
> For those who consider themselves intermediate to advanced Cocoa
> programmers, how long was the journey from newbie to competent and
> from competent to advanced ?  What percentage of your time did you
> dedicate over how many months ?
>
> Maybe we can establish a standard distribution of learning time
> required.  Just having a basis to set expectations might help future
> newbies.


I wouldn't consider myself an intermediate to advanced Cocoa 
programmer, however the time span between when I started looking at 
the Aaron Hillegass book to when I released a Cocoa application was 1 
year (mid 2002 to mid 2003). So you could consider this moving from 
newbie to competent . I did this in my spare time -- weekends and some 
week nights. My daytime job had nothing to do directly with 
programming (and certainly nothing to do with Mac programming). My 
previous experience was C-programming, Forth (MacForth and Mach II), 
and 6502 assembly. These were also self-taught.

By the way, prior to looking at Objective-C, I didn't "grok" OO 
programming at all (to use the vernacular). It was only after reading 
Aaron Hillegass a while that I started to "get it". The other book I 
used was "Cocoa Programming" by Anguish, Buck, and Yacktman (two of 
the authors on here). That book is now a little "long in the tooth" 
since it uses Project Builder and the old version Interface Builder. 
However it is still a good reference for the basic Cocoa classes. Also 
it has stuff on Cocoa Design Patterns. Interestingly, the book (even 
with 1200+ pages) barely mentions File's Owner -- a topic of great 
interest around here lately.

Jim Merkel