In the past couple of weeks I’ve travelled away from home and experienced something entirely new. It’s a place I’ve always wanted to go but didn’t have the courage or dedication to actually book the ticket. It’s an interesting but foreign destination; a place that thousands call home.
If you’ve ever been on a business trip to an exciting destination you know the feeling. You’re not a tourist, but you’re not at home. You like it there, but the residents can tell that you’re an outsider.
My current destination is iOS programming. I’d like to say that things look familiar to me but they really don’t. I make my home with SQL and PHP4. Trying to relate things I’m learning in the object oriented world of Objective-C to the well known, almost secondary language, of procedural PHP scripts and stored procedures can be mind numbing. What are they talking about? Why does every string have to be called “myString”? What’s with all the [square brackets]?
I’m a hands-on person. I usually learn by doing rather than reading. When I tried to take my usual approach to Objective-C it was like a punch in the gut. “OK, my application works! Now what the hell does all this code mean?” So I did myself a favor this weekend and bought a couple iOS programming books. I’m not anywhere close to finishing either of them but I can easily say that they’ve given me confidence that I can learn Objective-C. There’s a lot of work ahead of me, but I can already see that a lot of the early trouble I had with understanding the language was syntax based. Now that I know what all the brackets and asterisks are for I can worry about the features that make the iPhone such a great platform.
So, I’m still a business traveller but who knows… I could see myself becoming a resident here.
myGoodbye = @"Goodbye!";
@end
-Matt