On Learning Objective-C

28 May 2011

Learning Objective-C has been an interesting experience, and this is how I went about it.

My motivation in learning Obj_C was most of all add another language to my toolkit. I wanted to get behind the mysteries of developing for the iOS.

Found a fairly good set of coursework to get started at http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iphonedev/ . This is a very basic introductory course and the set of presentations guide you through developing a complete iPhone application. Before this I had no clue on how to use XCode. This helped me grasp the basic language concepts. Going through the whole set is highly recommended.

There is a very handy Obj-C tutorial at http://cocoadevcentral.com/d/learn_objectivec/

Setting up tests was frustrating in XCode 3. Although XCode4 has improved on this, it is no where near Eclipse and Visual Studio. Skip the built in test framework (STAssert) in favour of OCHamcrest and you’ll be in familiar territory. There was a bit of hair pulling in figuring out how to get XCode4 to use it.

Now that I’ve figured out XCode4 , I’m going through the  iOS development videos at http://developer.apple.com/videos/iphone/ .