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That said, the Cocoa/iOS ecosystem has better resources for diving deep into its style and capabilities than any other I have worked with. The Big Nerd Ranch s
by asolove 12y ago
That said, the Cocoa/iOS ecosystem has better resources for diving deep into its style and capabilities than any other I have worked with.
The Big Nerd Ranch set of books [1] is fantastic. It explains "how we do things" and "how we learn about new things" for its community better than any other book for any other community I've tried. It doesn't just teach a language or show a few examples, but actually walks you through the experience of reading documentation for, playing around with, and ultimately building a finished app using a new API or part of the ecosystem. After you're done with the books, there is plenty to learn, but you know where to look and how to go about doing it.
Then I compare that to what it took me to become a web programmer. While it seems "easy" now, the amount I had to read about http, OSes, browsers, the dom, security, performance, etc. is astonishing. Without any of these topics, I would have made terrible mistakes. And each of these topics was covered in a separate book, which often showed best practices for that topic mixed into code using poor practices with regard to the other topics.
[1] http://www.bignerdranch.com/we-write/ http://www.bignerdranch.com/we-write/
- krat0sprakhar 12y agoAbsolutely. I am quite averse to IDEs (prefer Vim) but Xcode is just fantastic! Committing the massive iOS API to muscle memory seems next to impossible and I'm glad Xcode makes your life so easy (Can't say that about Android / Eclipse certainly). PS: Much thanks for Big Nerd Ranch! Didn't know of these guys before.
- pookieinc 12y agoI'm the same way (averse to IDEs, preferring Vim over them) and while I haven't tried Xcode, I've got to say, I'm really enjoying the opposite direction of Visual Studio. Especially with ReSharper, it's one of the better IDEs I've used. Haven't tried the latest VS (2013) but 2010 and 2012 have been great. The only thing is, as of late, VS2012 feels a bit chunkier than 2010 did, making it feel slower. Having said that though, it's still very usable. It's nice to have Vim for my Ruby/Python scripts and something like Visual Studio for C#, I really don't mind given the lovely environment it provides.
- maroonblazer 12y agoAt the risk of going off-topic: as an iOS dev who's interested in learning web dev, is there a book that comes closest to a "BNR for web dev"? Or a set of books you'd recommend?
- asolove 12y agoNo, not even close. Unfortunately you just have to get the best (at the time) book for each topic: web basics/http, the backend language and web framework of your choice, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the JavaScript library of your choice, BOM/DOM and security model, etc. Probably your best bet is to do something like CodeSchool that has a long series of guided videos. But you have to know that after that, you will still lack a lot of knowledge, be working in a much more hostile environment, and have to put up with reading generally lower-quality documentation than in the Apple walled garden.