May 5, 2003

  • Mere days before I got ‘Steering the Craft,’ I got another all-time classic: ‘Objective-C: Pocket Reference‘ by Andrew M. Duncan.

    Objective-C is an object-oriented variant on the C programming language. It predates C++ by a very small (almost non-existant) margin. It’s more like Smalltalk than C++. I like it a lot.

    I learned Objective-C by accident while trying to learn Cocoa, Apple’s application framework, which natively uses the language. When I say ‘by accident,’ I mean in that in the worst possible way.

    I wish I’d been able to buy ‘Objective-C: Pocket Reference’ way back then… So much more would have made sense. There’s not much literature out there for ObjC, beyond Apple’s documentation and mailing list archives.

    I wanted to mention this book because it’s very well written, succinct, to-the-point, and has zero extraneous fluff. It’s almost as poetic as well-written Objective-C.