[MacRuby-devel] books for learning cocoa

[Scott Thompson]

On Jun 23, 2008, at 4:32 PM, Jakub Suder wrote:

> But the problem is, while I'm quite good at Ruby (I work as a Rails  
> developer), I'm completely new to
> Cocoa programming and even to Macs in general.
>
> So I'd like to ask you, could you recommend me some [e]books or  
> other  sources of information that would help me get
> started?


The question of getting started with Cocoa comes up quite a lot in the  
Cocoa Developent forum at lists.apple.com (http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/cocoa-dev 
).  While I would welcome you to join that development list and ask  
any questions you like, I can tell you that the list of recommended  
books for folks new to Cocoa development usually include:

Aaron Hillegass' Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X - http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-Mac-OS-3rd/dp/0321503619

And the tutorial information at Apple's web site which are rooted at:

http://developer.apple.com/referencelibrary/GettingStarted/GS_Cocoa/index.html


> Should I get  some book about general Cocoa programming (non-Ruby)  
> at first?

This question has also come up before, though I don't remember if it  
was on the RubyCocoa list or Cocoa-dev.  The general consensus seemed  
to be that if you're interested in doing Cocoa programming, your best  
bet is probably to learn Cocoa first using Objective-C and then figure  
out how that translates into Ruby.

There's a lot to learn when coming up to speed on Cocoa.  Most of the  
tutorials are written in Objective-C and dealing with the  
peculiarities of the RubyCocoa bridge just complicate the learning  
process.

Still, since you're coming at this from the Ruby side of things... you  
might go through this tutorial just to get your feet wet:

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/RubyPythonCocoa/Articles/BuildingRubyCocoaAppl.html

> How big difference is there between programming in RubyCocoa and
> in MacRuby - is it small enough to be able to learn everything from a
> RubyCocoa book and then just change a few simple things to adapt that
> knowledge to MacRuby?

 From what I've seen, the changes needed to adapt a Cocoa program  
written for Ruby 1.8.x to MacRuby should be pretty minimal, though I  
must admit that I haven't spent much time trying to do that.

Scott