Josh's Tech Blog

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Ever since Apple released their SDK for the iPhone, i’ve been more interested in programming on the Mac side of things.  The iPhone was motivation, but programming on OS X sounded interesting as well.  I consider myself a “jack of all trades, master of none” so why not add this knowledge to my belt too?

When going to school, they drilled us with C/C++ until the final year we got to use C#.  My review of Programming in Objective-C 2.0 by Stephen G. Kochan will be from the perspective of a somewhat experienced C/C++/C# user who has never seen Objective-C before.

One thing I’ve learned about C/C++ is that once you have a handle on it, almost every other programming language is the same thing, save for some syntax.  In a nutshell, I see Objective-C is the result of some inbred freak baby that C and C++ created one night.  The language itself has ints, chars, doubles, classes, inheritance, and so on.  The Foundation Toolkit Apple provides is like the STL in Objective-C land.  You have your lists, dictionaries, strings, etc.  Very handy!

That being said, if you know C/C++ and the STL, you know most of Objective-C.  Don’t let you discourage you from buying this book though!  This book makes a great read.  Since I understood most of the concepts, I was plowing right through it, only slowing down to catch the syntax differences.  Most of the book deals with the language itself just like most C/C++ books would.  The 2nd part of the book deals with the Foundation Framework (Apple’s STL).  The ideas are the same as the C++ STL, just syntax differences.

The final section in the book tickles your ass with a feather getting you creating your first iPhone application.  The application they have you create is a calculator application.  It doesn’t go into many advanced iPhone SDK topics, but teaches you just enough to make you say to yourself, “Hmm, this isn’t so bad”  I almost wish there was another iPhone chapter in the book, but I know it’s only in there just for fun.

The good thing about this book though is once you’re finished with it you can move onto an iPhone programming book and won’t be scared away by all that Objective-C code.