Help A New Developer

[chris e boy]

Hi guys,

You may have seen me around the forums once or twice, i've been an active participant here for a couple of years now. I'm a developer/web developer/designer for my local council, mainly coding VB.NET in Windows, JavaScript and ASP but I would like to expand my skills to include Cocoa development and don't know where to start. I'm not interested in RealBasic because of the cost involved and i'm not entirely happy with the hassle of building Mono programs, I'd like to learn how to code Cocoa natively.

I bought a book a few years back (one of the Wrox ones) and started working through it but was sickened at the thought of manual garbage collection. Now in the new Xcode, this can be mostly managed for you, so I thought i'd have another shot but don't know where to start.

There don't appear to be any new books on Cocoa coming out that deal with the new Xcode, and I soon got lost following some of the older tutorials because of the interface changes in Interface Builder. Does anyone have any good links, books or advice on where to begin? I have a fairly basic knowledge of C but advanced VB and JavaScript skills. It would be nice if there was some way to explore this from the perspective of a VB developer if possible.

Sorry if I've waffled a bit, hope someone can help me out.

[Nogs]

At the moment the best bet is Apple's Development site, but a lot of the stuff I was looking at assumed you knew the stuff before.

Big Nerd Ranch have a book which I like called "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" and on their website they are saying:

We are working on a third edition -- it should be out in the spring of 2008. If you are eager to learn Leopard-specific techniques before that, you should attend the Cocoa bootcamp.

http://www.bignerdranch.com/products.shtml

So that is at least one updated book coming out, but still a way off.

[bassplayinMacFiend]

Wow, that's excellent the BNR is coming out with a new edition. Last year they said they weren't planning any new editions so I'm psyched about this revelation. :)

I would definitely pick up the BNR Cocoa programming book.

I took Eric Tremblay's (http://www.macdev.ca) Intro to OS X Programming back in '04 and that's what gave me what I needed to jump into OS X programming, but Montreal is a bit closer to me than it is to you. :)

[chris e boy]

Thanks for the help guys. Looks like it may be worth holding off until that book comes out. If anyone else has any additional advice I would be grateful.

[Kickaha]

Well, you could always grab a copy of the *last* edition, use that to get up to speed on the basics, and then read the ADC docs to get the new bits while waiting for the new book.

Generally, they take a few months to come out. If you're comfy with the delay, sure, but I don't know that it's really necessary.

[bassplayinMacFiend]

Yea, you could always start with Apple's temp. converter program to get your feet wet. Then do a google on Cocoa tutorials. There's some good ones out there and each one you do will show you more of how things work in Apple's world.

[chris e boy]

Yea, you could always start with Apple's temp. converter program ...

Got a link?

[bassplayinMacFiend]

Got a link?

Here's the tutorial link (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjCTutorial/01Introduction/chapter_1_section_1.html).

Also check out --> http://www.cocoadevcentral.com/ for many more tutorials and info.

[chris e boy]

thanks mate