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I really only have experience with web development with Rails and in PHP. I also have done a little Java at school. I am considering diving into iPhone develo
by jpdbaugh 16y ago
I really only have experience with web development with Rails and in PHP. I also have done a little Java at school. I am considering diving into iPhone development and learning Objective C. Would I get at least some of the benefits of learning C that you all have described in this thread from Objective C? From what I understand you even have to learn some raw C to work with Objective C.
- jonhohle 16y agoObjective-C is just a layer on top of C (and inlcudes a C interface to the runtime as well). Knowledge of pointers and memory management is required in Objective-C. Objective-C methods _are_ C functions. I would imagine it would be hard to be effective at Objective-C without a working knowledge of C.
- mechanical_fish 16y agoThe answer is "yes, some". You will have to deal with pointers and memory allocation, though I believe the newest ObjC runtime has a garbage collector so your exposure might be limited... if you're lucky. ;) And you'll get a general exposure to C syntax, the compilation cycle, et cetera. From a strictly pedagogic perspective, it would also be good to spend some time studying vanilla C and the POSIX APIs. When we say the phrase "learning C" in a thread like this one, we tend to actually mean "learning to work at a lower level of abstraction, closer to the OS, to assembly language, or even to the hardware itself". And I believe that most of iPhone development consists of telling Cocoa to do things, and Cocoa is presumably not a very low level API -- thank god. However, any C is better than no C, and iPhone development is fun and useful, so if it inspires you, go for it.