Hillegass in the Books!

Today I breezed through the 3 remaining chapters of the Objective-C Programming, The Big Nerd Ranch Guide. All were very basic and were maybe Hillegass's way of saying have a nice, easy, exit. The last chapters dealt entirely with classic C constructs such as Arrays and the Switch statement. It also discussed how to work with command-line arguments in the 2nd to last chapter. I am not sure if Kochan showed how to run the program from within Xcode but Hillegass did. I liked that.

Now that we are at the end of the book, I can compare the Hillegass to Kochan books. I would have to say they are different animals. While Hillegass is, for the most part, an easing into Objective-C, Kochan goes into a lot of detail and is much more demanding. If I were to do it all over again, I would start with Hillegass and work into Kochan. I also found Kochan's end-of-chapter exercises to be of a greater benefit than Hillegass's occasional, and sometimes out-of-context, challenges.

While Hillegass spent a good third of the book on C, Kochan stressed that C should be used only in situations where Objective-C is not available. I am not sure who to believe but my guess is that my apps won't be so intense as to require much C.

I have started reading the Apple Objective C documentation. It assumes some knowledge as I had to take a detour to read about dynamic typing and dynamic binding. I am guessing there will be more of these types of assumptions as I go through it. I will soon go to Barnes and Noble to look at Xcode books. That may or may not be my next topic.