Cocoa Programming exercises

Since I bought the Mac I’m trying to learn to program in that environment. I have a couple of books to that effect, but for some reason I can’t retain (pun intended) the knowledge in my head to effectively develop on the Mac - that is, I’m constantly referring to the books for every step I need to take. Be it for having to use Interface Builder and its myriad options, or the fact that not using automatic garbage collection scares me (my pointers are certainly rusty), the thing is, I’m sure that if I exercise regularly - as in a code Kata - in the end I will master it.

That’s why I’m starting this new section. I’m gonna follow the exercises in Aaron Hillegass’ book, Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X in public, commenting and expanding them, so that the peer pressure makes me do it regularly. Mi intention is, provided I have the time and skill, to also rewrite the exercises in some other language than Objective-C -but with bindings for Cocoa, of course- such as Ruby or C# and, while doing so, prepare myself for the release of Leopard, where alternative languages will gather more importance.

Even better if, in doing this, some reader can benefit from it. Likely, having the book will be a requisite to follow the posts effectively, but I will try to make them self-contained. Let’s see how I fare…