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Comment on "A Roadmap Through Cocoa"
by Scott Lewis — Jan 31
This is probably somewhat off-the-wall compared with the general texture of these comments on learning Cocoa, but what I found most useful in learning/continuing to learn Cocoa was exploring Smalltalk more thoroughly.
It could be argued that much of what Obj-C/Cocoa/Xcode is doing is creating a better Smalltalk. I don't mean just the language, but the entire programming environment.
Dealing with the way Smalltalk handles the user interface clears up many of the mysteries of how Interface Builder works, as IB seems (to me) to be designed to overcome some Smalltalk limitations. Similarly, Smalltalk makes KVC seem very reasonable, as the alternative is a kind of "ritualistic" coding.
Also, exploring Smalltalk can help make your code much more fully object-oriented. For example, classic Smalltalk does not have anything like a "case" statement. Why? Because in classic O-O coding, you should always use polymorphism instead. Each object should know what to do when sent a standard message.
I would note, though, that I come from a background of studying English Lit, rather than Math or Science, so this could be a very idiosyncratic approach!
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