Exploration Through Example

I’m ready for people to take a look at a chapter. It’s actually the second chapter of the book. The introduction, covering prerequisites, the general plan of the book, its goals, what “Cocoa” is, etc.—that will probably be written last.

But to orient yourselves:

• I assume you know Ruby, but nothing about Objective-C, Cocoa, or building apps on the Mac.

• Rather than build the exposition from the outside-in, teaching you first how to draw user interfaces, I’m working from Ruby up. I start with Ruby, start adding Cocoa ideas and tools onto it. The first chapter is very much like that—I’ll let you be the judge of whether it works.

• Especially in the beginning of the book, I want people to start changing code and seeing what happens. Might as well take advantage of Ruby’s fast edit-run loop.

The chapter and associated code are distributed as a disk image.

What am I looking for? Don’t bother with typos, misspellings, grammar, awkwardly-placed figures, and the like: those will all get changed later. I’m interested in two things:

1. Did the approach work for you? Did this chapter flow in a pleasing and sensible way? Is there information inexplicably missing?

2. Where did you get confused or stuck, in either the text or the “try this yourself” sections? Why? What would have helped?

Thanks.

Further announcements will probably go only to the mailing list.