I just finished chapter 14 of the Objective-C book and realized I haven’t written about it again since my first post. That is partly because I fell out of rhythm during the first week of teaching summer session, and when I returned to it, I had to back up and repeat a few chapters. But I found my groove again over the weekend and am hoping to keep it up as class resumes tomorrow.
It has been exciting learning (again, in some ways) how to do something new. I feel like I learn about new things fairly regularly with my job, but I don’t have that many opportunities to learn a new skill. The doing aspect really started to become apparent around chapters 7 (loops) and 8 (addresses and pointers); in both of these cases, the challenges were surprisingly satisfying to solve. I also spent a good bit of time wrestling with structs and typedefs in chapter 10.
Crossing into the Objective-C part of the book was a welcome change, as I feel more affinity for the syntax and wealth of tools compared to straight C. The challenges feel more like puzzles in part because of this, like all the pieces are there and I just have to learn how to put them together.
The discussion forum for the book is also helpful as a reference and to see how others have solved the challenge problems. I was stuck on how to convert a BOOL type return into the word ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, and someone had posted their syntax for doing so:
BOOL dst = [tz isDaylightSavingTime];
NSLog(@"Is it daylight saving time? %s", dst ? "Yes" : "No");
I continue to appreciate the Kindle version. When I’m working in my office, I can have a browser open to the Kindle Cloud Reader on one side of the screen and Xcode on the other; at home, I can command-tab between them. I’ve read this book on my iPad far less than I anticipated due to the need to practice the exercises while reading. I did find myself doing some review and re-reading on my phone while away from my computer for a few days, which was nice.
Gravitropic 