At the beginning of the month, Jim and I moved into a new apartment—the three-bedroom next door to our old apartment! It was the easiest move of my life. The new apartment is fantastic, with twice the closet space and a third room to enjoy. Next year we’re hoping to make that third room a nursery!

About a week ago I got an email from Big Nerd Ranch telling me how best to prepare for the trip. I’m reading Programming in Objective-C 2.0 by Stephen Kochan. Let me tell you something about Objective-C: The syntax is very dissimilar to every other programming language I know. So far that has been the biggest barrier in working through this book. For example, when you need to call a function on an instance of a class in Actionscript or Java, you do this:

myObject.method(arguments);

In Objective-C:

[myObject method: arguments];

It’s not impossible to understand, just hard to get used to. Defining a class is also somewhat different: instead of just one class definition enclosed by curly braces, it’s this:

[cpp]@interface ClassName: Parent Class
{
// instance variables go here
}
// instance & class methods (declaration only) go here
@end

@implementation ClassName
// method definitions go here
@end[/cpp]

I’ll be posting one more time before I leave for the Big Nerd Ranch on Friday, and hopefully after I’ve gotten through a few more chapters in the Objective-C book. Once I arrive in Georgia, I will be posting at the end of every day with any interesting highlights (code-related or otherwise).