Learning Cocoa before Cocoa touch? [closed]

Question

I'm currently about 3/4's of the way through Lynda.com Objective C's essential training and am really enjoying it so far. My goal is like many programmers is to use these skills to make an ios game. Currently the only other tutorial that Lynda.com is hosting is a Cocoa essential training video for Mac osx development. I'm really enjoying the the style of teaching and the production of the Lynda.com videos and I was wondering.

Will learning Cocoa before Cocoa touch be a major help? Or would it be MORE beneficial to rather just focus on my main goal and learn Cocoa touch.

Answer 1

Will learning Cocoa before Cocoa touch be a major help? Or would it be MORE beneficial to rather just focus on my main goal and learn Cocoa touch.

For someone that already knows Objective-C and Cocoa, picking up Cocoa Touch is pretty easy. I'm not sure that learning Cocoa for the sole purpose of learning Cocoa Touch will give you any significant advantage compared to learning Cocoa Touch first, but the experience you gain will certainly be relevant to learning Cocoa Touch. In particular:

• You use Objective-C with both, so any experience you gain with the language will transfer directly.
• The Foundation framework is exactly the same in both cases.
• Patterns used in Cocoa and Cocoa Touch are the same. For example, MVC, the view hierarchy, the responder chain, delegation, KVO & KVC, and notifications all work the same way in both Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.
• Many other facilities such as Core Data, OpenGL, networking facilities, and others are either identical on both platforms or very similar.

The main differences in the frameworks are those that are driven by the real differences in the platforms. For example, iOS devices rely more on touch events and less on commands and keystrokes than desktop machines, and that difference is reflected in the frameworks.

If you're enjoying yourself, go ahead and do the Cocoa course. It won't hurt you, you'll have fun, you'll learn quite a bit about MacOS X development even if you hadn't planned on that, and you'll gain some experience that'll be useful as you tackle iOS.

Answer 2

Learning Mac OS will be beneficial, no doubt about it. And then switching from OSx to iOS is very easy.

But for me, after working for 3 years of OSX, I feel iOS is not so much of differnce. GUI components becomes less.

One of the powerful feature of OSX is Binding that I miss in iOS.

In OSX you need to deal with Operating System but rarely in case of iOS.

After grasping all the minutes of objecitve-c and cocoa you need to learn iOS.

This Site is the best for learning Objective-C and or iOS Application development.