I want to start programming under OS X. Where to start?

March 18, 2005 1:59 AM

I've done some programming in my time (Basic & Turbo Pascal way back when), shifted more to the web side of everything about 8 years ago (procedural PHP server-side and HTML&JS&CSS client-side). Having recently purchased a mac mini, and hearing the gospel of how easy it is to program with carbon & cocoa, does anybody have any recommendations (books) on where to start?

I'm not looking into writing the next big MMPORG or anything like that, just little apps and work myself up from there

posted by slater to computers & internet (5 comments total)

The Developer Connection site at Apple has some good stuff for beginners.

The Getting Started With Cocoa and Getting Started With Carbon pages should point you towards the relevant resources.

You'll want the latest version of Xcode (download, free registration required).

I would learn Cocoa, rather than Carbon. It's a very powerful, modern framework and I reckon you'll get results faster with it. If you were coming across from, say, Win32 programming, I think Carbon would involve a smaller conceptual leap. But since you're completely fresh to GUI programming, either framework is gonna involve a bunch of new ideas, so you might as well leap straight into Cocoa -- it's the future of Mac OS X programming, rather than the past.
posted by chrismear at 4:16 AM on March 18, 2005

I learnt Cocoa solely from this tutorial and a bit of googling.

I think XCode is included on the Mac mini install DVD, if you want to skip the huge download.

(Save this tip for later: You need to know, but won't be told, that when an object is autoreleased, it gets released when the program returns to the main runloop to wait for the next event, and not at some arbitrary point in the future)
posted by cillit bang at 6:18 AM on March 18, 2005

Ditto on the XCode, and I've also seen/read many references to this book being one of the best: Learn C on the Macintosh.
posted by misterioso at 7:53 AM on March 18, 2005

For 'little apps' I'd consider Real Basic - it has automatic memory-management, avoids the complications of multiple inheritance and it's cross platform: Mac (carbon), Win32 and Linux.
posted by Lanark at 8:43 AM on March 18, 2005

Real Basic is an expensive joke for writing buggy do-nothing applications that are just as easy to write in Cocoa. Don't go near it.
posted by cillit bang at 9:58 AM on March 18, 2005