Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X is now available on Amazon’s US store. UK store to follow. This coincides nicely with my “Thursday Is Code Night In Bangor” plans. I already have second edition but I’d like third edition because things have changed. That said – even third Edition, though it covers Leopard specific topics such as Core Animation, doesn’t include the iPhone.
This, on the other hand, pisses me off. So much for Sterling being stronger than the dollar.
| Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | UK price in $ | |
|---|---|---|---|
| RRP | $49.99 | £35.99 | $70.06 |
| Price | $31.49 | £28.79 | $56.05 |
Anyway, I digress.
Last night we worked from a different book: Wrox’s Beginning Mac OS X Programming. I don’t have any practical programming experience but I do have a couple of weeks of academic programming (spread across a dozen languages and over 20 years so I effectively know how to say “Hello World” in about 12 languages.) My brother has no programming experience but wants to spend his time constructively rather than sitting around tweaking his wolf.config file for a few extra FPS. We’d scheduled in a one-night-a-week session where we’d get together and learn to write code.
I’d previously considered my options. 50% of my head says to go with PHP or Ruby as they seem to be extremely marketable but I don’t think that I’d be happy with that. I want to make Mac apps and later, iPhone apps. And that realistically means going with Objective-C and Cocoa.
So we spent two hours last night having some fun with compile errors and yeah, it was fun. The material we worked on last night was basic to me but first time knowledge for D. And, to my surprise, at the end, D suggested that we increase this to two nights a week. As I’m in the house on weeknights I’ve been vegging out a lot, reading, writing stuff for lategaming and working through DVDs that I’ve not seen but this new productivity is quite motivating.
We typed in the sample code and then when we got it to compile correctly (the authors deliberately put mistakes in the code!) I suggested a couple of ways we could extend the code which wasn’t in the book and we resolved to do that as homework.
Good times.