Week 2: Getting up and running

I now have a Macbook - purchase price AUD$1099.

Plan for this week
1. Get xCode up and running
2. Get through most of Objective C

On the getting xCode up and running front
Item 1 sounds easy - i already have a love hate relationship with Macs. Love the look of it - but it seems to be built in such an idiot proof fashion, that all the good stuff that i want to see is simply hidden.

xCode cannot be found anywhere on my system so I think, ok, i'll download it. I found it for 2.3gb (did someone say bloatware?) on the apple developer site, together with the iPhone SDK. I tried downloading it at 2 sites and hit my download limit at both places (which i now know is 2GB and then my pipes slow down to narrowband - it could take all night at that rate. There has to be a better way.

dropped into my local mac shop who told me it would be on the cd that came with the laptop. It was - i loaded it and am now ready to go.

On the learning Objective C front
I'm reading the book: 'Programming in Objective-C 2.0', 2nd edition by Stephen G. Kochan.

So far, so good. I picked this one because its focus is objective c without all the other who-har of iphone/cocoa etc. It assumes no knowledge of any language. I've read about a third of it (yes the easy bits) and so far i'm less than impressed with objective c. To me it was designed by someone who wanted to make programming complicated, when there was no need to. Ii'm sure it's powerful, but let's face it, if you can write a line of code like this -(int) set: (int) n: (int) d; then something is wrong. That's a setter method declaration

I can hear myself each day say - oh VB is so much easier to do exactly the same thing - but I will try to hold off and reserve my judgement because I'm sure there are better and easier ways of doing everything as I learn more about the language.

One last needle though. Class member declarations...what for? I really don't see the purpose of this separation at all - for big or small programs/classes etc. In my view it only leads to update mistakes between the definition and the declaration and additional coding....but that's C for you.

It's interesting to note that the additions that Objective C has introduced into the C language seem to make it more like VB, for example the dot operator when using instance member variables....but i still haven't worked out how to make them read only...stay tuned.