The Beginning

The hardest part of starting anything is the beginning. Having a guide to carry the lantern makes it a whole lot easier to follow the path, and this is the reason why people want to go to NIIT instead of learning things themselves. After all, there is probably more knowledge today on the Internet than any other public repository. You can learn Java, PHP, C++, C and anything else you like - for free, over the net. You can also learn a lot of other stuff that has nothing to do with computers whatsoever. But knowledge on the Internet is not always necessarily organized, easy to follow, written in an easily readable style or format and a lot of the times it can be downright distressing. But there's a joy in self-discovery, in trial and error and finally, in finding the Light that isn't there when somebody is leading you along a fixed path.

So, how does one make a beginning in Cocoa development for Mac OS X?

That's the question that dwelt in the minds of P and K, the two young programmers that are. The obvious place to search first was Apple's website, Apple being the chief agent in all Cocoa affairs, having invented the environment. And P and K were lucky. They found a tutorial called Currency Converter which not only explains all the necessary concepts of object-oriented programming, but also states the advantages of Objective-C over other languages like C++ and teaches how to use Apple's IDE "Xcode". The only snag in this perfect website can be that it rather likes to use complicated language sometimes, which takes more than a glance to understand.

• Introduction to developing Objective-C Cocoa Applications

In addition to the tutorial, there's also a guide to learning the Objective-C language, which explains also the concepts of object-oriented programming in addition to the syntax.

• The Objective-C Programming Language

These are the best resources that P & K have found on Apple.com. Sometimes hard to follow, often making the brain do a lot of thinking, but always informative and dead accurate, these resources help you learn the language and the development environment.

--K