My Cocoa learning continues, albeit slowly. I'm halfway through the Cocoa book, and have been feeling a bit overwhelmed. I often feel like I'm just typing in the code and not really understanding or learning it. I suspect a lot of people feel that way when learning a new programming language from a book...

For the past few days I've taken a break from the book and have been trying to build some simple apps on my own. I found this link, "Getting Started with Cocoa: a Friendlier Approach" on another blog, and have found it to be helpful. This quote in particular rings true with me:

"...any attempt to "learn Cocoa" is going to result in disappointment. We’ve just got to get you on your feet and show you how to find answers."

Which is exactly how I'd go about learning any language - by figuring out where to find the answers. For example, I'm no expert at PHP, but I can write and work with PHP programs pretty easily because I know where the docco* is. (It also helps that PHP syntax is pretty similar to Perl, which I'm quite familiar with.)

Cocoa, on the other hand, is proving more troublesome. Not because there's no docco - quite the contrary, there are copious amounts of documentation. The problem of figuring out what to look for, and where to find it. I end up switching between AppKiDo, the built-in Xcode help, and the developer website in fairly even amounts. (My earlier problems with the builtin Xcode docco was fixed by upgrading to Xcode 3.3.) The Apple developer website has a bunch of Cocoa documentation, including lots of useful guides.

I've also found out that while Apple doesn't have web forums for developers, there are a bunch of developer mailing lists. The cocoa-dev list can be browsed/searched on cocoabuilder.com.

And it probably goes without saying, but Google is another essential resource in finding the answers to how to do things in Cocoa.