About Objects class part 1 - Complete

I finished up part 1 of the About Objects ( http://www.aboutobjects.com ) class on Friday and am hoping to take part 2 in July.

For the most part is was terrific. I learned a ton of stuff about C that I didn't know (or thought I knew, but I was wrong) and the teacher was really good at conveying everything in a clear manner. Plus, he was a pretty cool dude.

The one thing I was a little disappointed in was that all day Thursday was a review of the things we learned Monday through Wednesday. This is because we had a few new people show up on Thursday that were there for the start of the Objective-C course, which follows the ANSI C one. Also, it was because a TON of information was presented through the ANSI C course and was therefore reviewed to the folks in the class that just went through it.

Unfortunately, this only left one day for Objective-C training. I know that the point is to lead the Obj-C into the following week (part 2) of the training course. So I'm sure for everyone that was staying for part 2 it was a great thing to have as a review. For me, though, I would have quite preferred two solid days of Obj-C. That's no fault to the About Objects folks. If I could have stayed the second week I'm sure I'd have a different view on things. :)

Regardless, the day of Obj-C that I did get taught me a number of nifty little bits. For example, one thing I was unaware of was what the NS stood for at the beginning of all the foundation class stuff. So, NSArray, NSObject, NSString, etc. In case you don't know, NS = NeXTStep. This is because OS X is really a descendant of the NeXTStep OS. Now that may not seem like it's all that helpful to know, but when you're coming from a Windows background and you're seeing all this weird Objective-C stuff (NSObject and the like), it's a bit confusing.

Also, the syntax of Obj-C is weird. To me anyway.

NSString *desc = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"Class: %@, Name: %@", [self class], @"Test"];

That looked really strange to me when I first saw it, but now I'm getting the hang of it.

Anyone interested in learning this stuff should consider About Objects. They were very nice and extremely helpful the entire way.

Other good things that I've picked up since have been a couple of iPad books (that were free!). They are:

• The Objective-C Programming Language
• Object-Oriented Programming in Objective-C

Both of them are available on the AppStore, again, for free.