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hansen

macrumors regular
Feb 12, 2004
158
0
Denmark
But for a beginners language neither C++ or Java seems to be good choices. Most beginners want to see some action: Windows, fonts, colors, boxes etc. I haven't seen anything that competes with Microsoft Visual Basic on this. It's so fast to learn to do some stuff for fun.

Iff you wan't to do more serious programming however, VB is not such a good choice. When the project gets bigger VB is a mess, in my opinion.

I once worked on a project that developed the business tier in C++ and GUI in VB. That worked out great. It would be great if there were such a thing for Java. I haven't worked with Eclipse so I don't know if that is an option. It tried Forte, but didn't liked it. I found it complicated and bloated
 

bousozoku

Moderator emeritus
Jun 25, 2002
15,600
1,756
Lard
hansen said:
But for a beginners language neither C++ or Java seems to be good choices. Most beginners want to see some action: Windows, fonts, colors, boxes etc. I haven't seen anything that competes with Microsoft Visual Basic on this. It's so fast to learn to do some stuff for fun.

Iff you wan't to do more serious programming however, VB is not such a good choice. When the project gets bigger VB is a mess, in my opinion.

I once worked on a project that developed the business tier in C++ and GUI in VB. That worked out great. It would be great if there were such a thing for Java. I haven't worked with Eclipse so I don't know if that is an option. It tried Forte, but didn't liked it. I found it complicated and bloated

I know what you mean. REALbasic is extremely similar in that you can drag and drop your way to a real application. It has all the problems and bloat of BASIC, so it's not a good choice for programming but you see results quickly.

When I did a lot of Windows development, I used C++ for the backend and ObjectPascal (Delphi) for the frontend.

Borland's JBuilder is the closest thing but there is something else for Java: NetBeans. It's confusing to me but I use it for creating dialog boxes. It's strange that I have so many tools for Java and yet, I can exist with only one for C, C++, Objective-C and more. By 2116, I hope that things have settled a little. Eclipse is everything you want for huge project development. Forté was a pain and it was put away. NetBeans (also from Sun) will go away shortly in order to promote their new development environment.
 

MacFan26

macrumors 65816
Jan 8, 2003
1,219
1
San Francisco, California
bousozoku said:
NetBeans (also from Sun) will go away shortly in order to promote their new development environment.

What's their new development environment going to be? I've heard they're releasing an update to NetBeans in 'late summer,' but I don't really know if that is happening or not.
 

Shaun.P

macrumors 68000
Jul 14, 2003
1,601
24
Omicron Persei 8
I wanna learn how to program.

Hello everybody,

I'm 17 years old. I have Mac OS X (Panther), a G3 CRT 600 MHZ iMac with 640 MB of RAM.

I really want to learn how to program, however I don't know where to start. I'm from Scotland and as part of my Standard Grade and Higher in Computing Studies, we had to use a programming language. The one we used was called COMAL. I don't think it's very popular so you may not have heard of it. I want to learn how to program on my Mac, but I really don't have ANY idea where to start! Any help would be appreciated!

As part of the Higher Computing course, I studied the Software Development process where we studied (in some depth) Analysis, Design, Implementation, Testing, Documentation, Evaluation and Maintenance (ADITDEM).

Any help would be appreciated. I really don't want to spend any money. I have all my developer tools for Mac OS X, however they are uninstalled and I don't know if you have to be advanced to use them. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.
 

FredAkbar

macrumors 6502a
Jan 18, 2003
660
0
San Francisco, CA
FearFactor47:

I'm not sure how far you'll get if you "don't want to spend any money." At least in my experience, for major programming languages it's worth it to buy your own copy of a book, as opposed to trying to learn with just online tutorials. Now, if you can't afford to spend much money on stuff like that, then that's another matter, and I can understand that if that's the case.

Go ahead and install Xcode (the Panther dev tools) if you're interested in Mac programming. One thing that you can do right away is, once you install the dev tools, look in /Developer/Documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Objective C/ObjC.pdf. This pdf file is actually an entire 200+ page book on Objective C. It's how I learned Objective C. I didn't even read the whole thing, actually.

Once you know Objective C and are familiar with object-oriented programming (you will be somewhat, once you learn Objective C), it will be much easier to look at online tutorials for things like Cocoa. I'm not sure if you want to make specific Mac-only programs, or if you want to develop for Windows as well. If you want to develop good Mac OS X programs, use Cocoa (or Java, though I don't know much about that language, as you can tell from my earlier post asking about it). Apple has some decent free documentation online at http://developer.apple.com/ go there and scroll down a bit, you'll see a bunch of documentation pages, like links to http://developer.apple.com/cocoa and so on. If you do decide to buy a book on Cocoa, I would recommend Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, 2nd edition by Aaron Hillegass. I bought it, and used it to learn Cocoa.

In summary, there are online tutorials and things out there, but at least look at that pdf I mentioned, as it's basically a free book on Objective C, which you need to know in order to use things like Cocoa, and it also (I'm sure) would help you to learn other languages like Java or C++, since Obj-C, like those 2 languages, is object-oriented (which takes some getting used to, if you're used to more traditional languages like C).
 

bousozoku

Moderator emeritus
Jun 25, 2002
15,600
1,756
Lard
MacFan26 said:
What's their new development environment going to be? I've heard they're releasing an update to NetBeans in 'late summer,' but I don't really know if that is happening or not.

NetBeans version 4.0 is around the corner supposedly but there is something else to outdo everything else Sun has and it's called, I believe, Sun One Studio. If I'd heard correctly, it should use both Java and Mono to support development of .NET applications and services.
 

Colonel Panik

macrumors regular
Feb 23, 2004
206
14
Dublin, Ireland
Two recommendations:
Become an Apple Developer member (developer.apple.com) . It's free to join, and there are dozens of mailing lists where folks will be willing to help you get started.
Secondly, become an O'Reilly Safari member. For $10 a month you get an option of 5 books that you can read through. It's a lot cheaper than buying them and it's quicker than having to go to the local store for them.
 

Palad1

macrumors 6502a
Feb 24, 2004
647
0
London, UK
bousozoku said:
Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java is excellent, as are the other books in the series. You'd probably learn a lot from Learning Java from O'Reilly. I've got more than a dozen books on Java, including many from Sun and find very few to be truly useful or clear. My Java in a Nutshell from O'Reilly is my most-handled book on the subject but it might not be suitable for newer programmers.

I second that.

Bruce Eickel's thinking in java is a required reading, it truly is a gem. Plus, the electronic version is free so you can even google it!

Bruce rocks!
 

iNetwork

macrumors member
Jul 20, 2004
91
0
New Mexico
jsw said:
As we all know, Apple includes a great development suite free with each copy of Panther. They include Java. They include Apache. They include GNU tools.

So... there are a lot of resources.

Also, for Java - should you want to learn it - look into Eclipse.
So does Linux... May I remind you that programming is merely text that is compiled into machine language. Microsoft has introduced their drag-n-drop style programming which has helped the OS to proliferate. They have also been using API's which are basically "hooks" to microsoft owned code to bring up your dialog boxes, etc, so you don't have to program them from scratch yourself... Pico is my "code editor" along with a couple of good C/C++ and various other books...


May I also remind you that linux has been shipping with these tools far before OsX ever came to be!

To hell with Microsoft, not PC's...
 

whooleytoo

macrumors 604
Aug 2, 2002
6,607
716
Cork, Ireland.
Surely, one of the best (if not the best) Cocoa book out there: Cocoa Programming for MacOS X.

Although it refers to Xcode, it still isn't that different to Project Builder if you're running 10.2.8.

Some great online resources:
Mac Dev Center
Cocoa Dev Central

Also, the Usenet newsgroups are incredibly useful if you're trying to fix a problem. Try any of the comp.sys.mac.programmer groups. (Do a search on groups.google.com if you don't have a Usenet reader).

My advice: learn C if you don't already know it, then Objective C (it's not that much of a jump).

Then pick one feature you'd like to implement (such as a drawer, or a sheet, or a table view, or an open/save dialog etc), and using the sample code and the tutorials available on those sites, write a program to implement just that one feature. Then move onto the next one.

Once you've done these, you should then have the skills to implement any ideas you might have for your program.

Feel free to ask questions here too, if you have any specific queries or bugs.

Good luck!
 
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