Sick of REALbasic - Need Advice Re: Xcode

[MadDoc]

I have been using REALbasic for years and am very comfortable with it.

Recently though, I have realised that most of the apps I am developing are Mac-only (I am an avid Mac zealot) and REALbasic apps just don't look nice :-)

I have read a bit about C, PHP, and Java but have never really written any programs in them but the basic premise is similar whatever the programming language, it's just the grammar that's different right (put simplistically)?

I want to learn to write apps in Objective-C and I want to learn how to use Xcode. I appreciate that Leopard is out in (hopefully) a couple of weeks and I will be buying it immediately and that this will bring with it Objective-C 2.0 (with auto-garbage collection - something I am used to in REALbasic). Can anyone tell me where I am best to start? Books, web resources, etc. I need to start from writing a "hello world" app up to a large app (I have one in mind that I was going to write in RB but am going to hold off).

Should I start learning now I should I wait until Xcode 3 is out?

Many thanks,

MadDoc,

[sord]

I would say go ahead and start now, and start with Aaron Hillegass's Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (2nd Edition) - its an excellent book to get you started with Cocoa.

[Spike099]

I second sord's recommendation. Also pick up "Programming in Objective-C". There is no harm in starting now without Leopard.

[MadDoc]

Thanks guys,

How redundant will this stuff become with the release of obj-C 2.0?

[mduser63]

Thanks guys,

How redundant will this stuff become with the release of obj-C 2.0?

Objective-C is not going away, it's only getting some additions. I don't think you'll have any problem picking up the new stuff (we're all going to be doing that...) and while it will be nice to not have to worry about memory management so much, most of the things you'll learn will be the same in ObjC 2.0. Besides, if you want to develop apps that are compatible with Tiger, you'll need to use Objective-C 1.0.