Gah.

This post was published more than a few years ago (on 2006-02-09) and may contain inaccurate technical information, outmoded thoughts, or cringe takes. Proceed at your own risk.

Made it through the Spiderworks book on C just fine. Made it halfway through the Apple book, The Objective-C Programming Language… and then… my eyes started to glaze over.

I think the real reason is, I need practical experience with this stuff—the C book had exercises I could do, and most of the chapters I even grasped most of it without the exercises, but I think there’s only so far I can go through these foreign concepts without actually seeing them in action. I’m sure this makes a ton of sense to someone who’s been programming for a while, but I have passed the point of comprehension.

I’m not stupid. I can figure this out. I just need to come at it from a different angle.

The only question is whether to go back to Kochan’s book and hope that the extra reading will help me comprehend faster, even though I’m somewhat dreading the text-only tack he takes; or to plow headfirst into Hillegass’ book which will excite me more because it actually deals with Cocoa and graphical interfaces, and hope that my enthusiasm will carry me through the tough bits.

Do I really need to have a firm grasp of the ObjC language before I tackle Cocoa? ...or since I’ve got a decent handle on C (and at least read the Apple ObjC doc, if not quite grokked all of it), will that be enough to get me going with Hillegass’ book?

Any suggestions?