Recently I have been wanting to get into iPhone development, as well as Mac OSX development. One can develop with a number of languages for the Mac, but Apple really pushes Objective-C and Cocoa. For the iPhone, that’s really all we have until Sun releases Java for the mobile devices. Even then, sticking with a C language is probably preferable for fine-tuning memory management and keeping a low overhead.
I picked up “Programming in Objective-C 2.0″ by Stephen Kochan, and its a really decent book so far. Its super easy to get up to speed coming from C and Java. Objective-C is really just an extension on top of C which provides a lot of nice OO features. Objective-C 2.0 adds some nice features from what I’ve heard including synthesizing accessor methods for fields (or, properties as they are called) and adding a dot-notation, which gives accessing fields a nice Java-esqe feel, which is really nice for someone like me.
I like the C feel coming through with pointers. Instead of saying “new” class, you first do an alloc and then an init. How cool is that? The method syntax, though very different, is fairly intuitive. When you’re done with an instance you can release it (though Apple does have garbage collection for OSX).
Overall I’m pretty excited to dig into Objective-C and Cocoa. I’ll keep everyone updated as I go.