Experienced Objective-C/Cocoa Devs:
What are the key concepts that I should absorb early on that will get me closer to that epiphany moment where it all makes sense and I’m effectively creating solutions with Objective-C/Cocoa? I come from a .NET/Java background so everything I do is based on that paradigm.
I don’t need deep specifics but rather the one or two things that you ran into that were different and took a while to soak in. A good example would be when I went from QuickBASIC to C 20+ years ago … it took me forever to grasp the concept of a pointer. As a result I would say that a key concept of jumping from QuickBASIC to C is to understand memory addressing.
MEMORY MANAGEMENT. If you don’t understand pointers, the difference between the stack and the heap, and how to accurately manage memory, you will spend years trying to grok Objective-C and Cocoa, but never “get it”.
(I speak from experience; I [unfortunately] was taught to program in Basic-like languages, then spent 2 years trying to figure out what that #!@#^% asterisk meant. Then I took a Computer Engineering course, learned about memory, and then picked up Objective-C in a week)