Radio Bantik:
Days in the Life of an Alpha Geek

Okay, so my post-WWDC, desktop-application-envy got the better of me. Since I learn best with a project in my head, my laptop at hand, and a book at my side, I’m now working my way through a series of Cocoa and Objective-C books.

I just finished the first in my stack, Learning Objective-C on the Macintosh, by Mark Dalrymple and Scott Knaster, available from SpiderWorks.

I’m a long-time O’Reilly fan, but despite being burned on occasion by poor editing and worse writing, I’m not as averse to buying outside of their catalog as I used to be. And it’s paid off this time: I’m really glad that I chose this particular book to start with.

I love the fact that the authors focus on the language, not the environment. Interface Builder isn’t covered until the very last chapter of the book, and there’s rarely even a mention of XCode itself throughout. The sample code that you start writing at the beginning of the book gets refined as new concepts are introduced, and there’s nary a user interface in sight.

The chapters are short and clear and tend to focus on single concepts, with a sample-code-to-copy ratio that makes reading easy and skimming easier. The chapter on memory management and the autorelease pool alone (reinforced in subsequent chapters) made the book worth the money.

Learning Objective-C on the Macintosh also features an appendix highlighting differences between Objective-C and other languages, intended to make things easier to understand for those who are learning Objective-C after having mastered another language like C, C++, or Java first.

Attentive readers may ask: what is the Cocoa project that’s in my head? Really attentive readers will know that I’m not gonna tell yet. Attentive readers who know me personally may doubt that any such project will ever see the light of day, but they’re not being nice. (Psychic readers: no spoilers, please.)