Cocoa tips for PHP developers?

Question

I'm a PHP developer, and I use the MVC pattern and object-oriented code. I really want to write applications for the iPhone, but to do that I need to know Cocoa, but to do that I need to know Objective-C 2.0, but to do that I need to know C, and to do that I need to know about compiled languages (versus interpreted).

Where should I begin? Do I really need to begin with plain old "C", as Joel would recommend?

Caveat: I like to produce working widgets, not elegant theories.

Answer 1

Yes, you're really best off learning C and then Objective-C. There are some resources that will get you over the C and Objective-C language learning curve:

• Uli Kusterer's online book Masters of the Void
• Stephen Kochan's book Programming in Objective-C

And there are some resources that will get you over the framework learning curve:

• CocoaLab's online book Become an Xcoder
• Aaron Hillegass' book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X

Despite what Jeff might say, learning C is important for professional software developers for just this reason. It's sort of a baseline low-level lingua franca that other innovation happens atop. The reason Jeff has been able to get away with not learning C is not because you don't need to know C, but because he learned Pascal which is in many ways isomorphic to C. (It has all the same concepts, including pointers and manual memory management.)