Re: [Rubycocoa-talk] Objective-C Ubiquity?

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If Objective-C syntax seems obtuse, it's only because it bridges the  
world of good, dynamic, object-oriented programming languages with C,  
which is *the* systems and application programming language (even if C 
++ seems to have taken C's place, a lot of C++ code is still  
basically C: look at the Windows API, or Carbon). Objective-C is much  
nicer than programming in pure C, though, because you don't have to  
deal with things like strings, arrays, and memory management at a low  
level. Nor structs nor typedefs nor other such weirdness.

I'm not assuming anything about your programming background, but if  
you'd like, here's my recommended reading list for getting into  
Objective-C and Cocoa. Some of it's dense, but should nonetheless be  
useful if you chew on it for a while.

Just enough C to understand Objective-C better:
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/07/22/cocoa_series.html
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/08/01/cocoa_series.html
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/08/19/cocoa_series.html
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/09/09/cocoa_series.html
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/10/07/cocoa.html
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/01/13/cocoa.html

Apple's intro to Objective-C:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjectiveC/ 
index.html

After you've got a decent grasp on that, starting from the beginning  
of MacDevCenter's Cocoa Programming series is a very good way to get  
introduced to the things Cocoa can do and the architecture for doing so.

More generally, though, don't get discouraged if you don't  
immediately "get" Cocoa. While it's very well-architected, it's still  
a large, powerful, and therefore complex software system. I've been  
poking at it since 10.1.x and I still haven't learned all its  
capabilities, especially since they add more with each minor revision.

Hope this helps.

Pacem in terris / Mir / Shanti / Salaam / Heiwa
Kevin R. Bullock