Answering a question on Stack Overflow, asking for an explanation of the Application Delegate, how it is accessed and created.
In Cocoa, a delegate is an object that another object defers to on questions of behavior and informs about changes in its state. For instance, a UITableViewDelegate is responsible for answering questions about how the UITableView should behave when selections are made or rows are reordered. It is the object that the UITableView asks when it wants to know how high a particular row should be. In the Model-View-Controller paradigm, delegates are Controllers, and many delegates’ names end in “Controller.”
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Summary: If you want a real understanding of Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, this book is too recipe-based to give you that. If you really want recipes, consider Apple’s Sample Code.
I haven’t been thrilled with the first crop of iPhone development books that hit the market. This shouldn’t be surprising. It’s a new platform and, as with the first AppStore apps, the pressure to be first to market fights the authors’ desire to provide the best possible product.
I was specifically asked about iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK by Erica Sadun. My biggest concern is that it’s a cookbook based on “recipes” to do this or that. This is often exactly the problem with how people learn Mac and iPhone development. They think that it’s just Java or C++ with a different syntax and if they learn where the brackets go, then they’ll be a Cocoa developer. Read more…
Now and then I teach Mac and iPhone courses, and several people have asked me to detail my syllabus, and provide some other pointers on how to get started. I’ve taught this course in various forms, running from 3 to 10 days long. A week and a half is good; it gives you a weekend to absorb a little bit.
I tend to teach Mac and iPhone together, though I been focusing on iPhone because that’s what we’ve needed most. I still favor Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
as a textbook. I’m open to suggestions for excellent iPhone-specific books for beginners, but when I was developing this course last August, I didn’t find a lot on the market I was impressed with. Even the Big Nerd Ranch iPhone class I found disappointing, which is one of the reasons I had to write my own class for our new developers. The Big Nerd Ranch’s Cocoa Bootcamp still cannot be beat if you’re looking to learn Mac development and have several grand handy.
So without further ado, the syllabus and resources. I can’t promise that reading through this will be as effective as watching me pace around for a week telling you about it, but it perhaps it will give a nice kick-start. Read more…
