One of the really nice things about switching platforms is the plethora of new things one now has the capability to learn that you might not have found a reason to learn before.

I’m a stickler on having something practical to do when learning something. If I don’t have a real thing to shoot for when learning a language, its pretty much a guarantee that I won’t be able to learn it.

The conversion to the Mac platform, the availability of the development tools through the Apple Developer site, and some time spent reading iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business has given me a lot of motivation to dig down and learn Objective C.

Free tools have been around for Objective C programming for quite a long time. The GCC compiler has supported Objective C as far back as I could remember. But frankly, I saw no reason to learn it when I had all of these scripting languages available and most of my Unix work has been either web based, or command line driven tools.

However, the last three or four weeks sitting with the Mac and working within the Mac UI has gotten my curiousity peaked on this odd little language that really gets no visibility until a few guys from NeXT choose it as the basis of their development tools. I really want first hand experience to understand why the guys at NeXT chose this language as the basis of their platform.

Now, I’ve done a lot of C and C++ programming in the past, so one might think that learning Objective C would be no big deal. I have to tell you, I’m struggling a bit. One thing I do think is pretty cool is the dynamic nature of the language. To me, it seems very Python / Ruby – ish in that respect. However, its a lot to learn and I’m really going to have to spend some quality time with some books to get familiar with the concepts. Its very different than C++.

I’ve got three books on order from Amazon: Programming in Objective-C, Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 2nd Edition, and Building Cocoa Applications : A Step by Step Guide. Unfortunately, I received #2 before #1, and #1 is definitely the book I need first.

I think its pretty cool that I have the excuse to learn something completely different. The past four weeks on a new platform has been interesting to me. Its really like starting all over again with a whole new world available to me — which is what attracted me to this field in the first place.

Objective C Resources

• Objective-C: the More Flexible C++ – Linux Journal
• C and Objective C Compared – MacTech.com
• comp.lang.objective-c FAQ