Just from reading the title of this post most of you already know that I’m writing about Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, 3rd Edition by Aaron Hillegass. I am currently working through this fantastic manual that claims it will teach me 80% of what I need to know in order to get started.

Now it’s true that I’ve already released an app into the wild and some of you may be asking yourselves why such an accomplished software author would bother going back to learn the basics. First off, quit kissing my butt with that “accomplished software author” stuff, I’m not even close to that goal yet. However, your question is valid, why am I starting back at the beginning? The truth is that even though I consider myself a semi-decent programmer, I am hardly a decent Cocoa programmer. Yet.

When I decided to write Bezipped I chose it because it was an app that had a small enough scope that I could create it in a short amount of time, but big enough that I could make a decent amount of fundamental mistakes in its design and execution. I needed some sort of starting point, a basis for all the stuff I was going to learn, a comparison point for all the stuff I would do wrong.

I currently have 90 pages left to read in The Book and once I finish I’m most likely going to rewrite Bezipped from the ground up using all the techniques that I’ve learned over the past months. I may even document it on the blog here so you too can learn from my mistakes.