Being a pretty experienced PHP developer, and having a fair knowledge of C (Wrote a distributed computing experiment with 16 of my Dad’s NEC microcontrollers), I’d like to make the move to Objective-C and Cocoa, eventually aiming to integrate the Mac / iPhone apps with some of my PHP projects.
Going through the “Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X” book by Arron Hiilegass, I’m getting a little frustrated. I’m able to work the examples, but he doesn’t explain exactly why he’s using a class in that way (NSNumber instead of int or double for example).
I’m looking for a good book/books to lean Objective-C first. My question is, what would be a good book? I’m looking at “Programming In Objective-C 2.0” and it looks pretty decent. Where would I go from there? I’m thinking I should then re-start on my Cocoa book.
Also, are there any resources on the internet that would help in the transition from PHP to Objective-C? I know PHP is a loosely-typed scripting language, so it has its differences. There are some things that just don’t make sense with Obj-C and Cocoa, why can’t I put integers into an NSMutableArray?
Anyways. Thanks for the help! (I’m only 14, so go easy on me if I made any mistakes in my Q. )
I’ve just gone through “Programming In Objective-C 2.0” myself, and it’s pretty good. I’d recommend it, especially if you’ve never used C (or if you’ve forgotten it, like me).
However, Apple really has excellent documentation. If you don’t mind reading online, I’d start with their Getting Started with Cocoa page.