Big Nerd Ranch: Day 2
Another day. Another byte in the program. We’ve so far gone through another 5 chapters of Aaron’s book. Will we get to the finish in time? There are another 20 or so chapters left and I haven’t gotten to the last few during the time I tried his book. If we don’t, I think I will be somewhat disappointed.
My fellow classmates are an interesting bunch. They are a geekiness that I did not know existed. They are a more worldly geek. They know lots of differing programming paradigms, because they come from various industries and worked on many different projects throughout there work. But it is a beautiful sight to see all these Macs pounding out code.
My TiBook is the grandfather in the place. Besides the ancient cube running as a server and a few of the Big Nerd Ranch’s iMacs, everyone has a more recent Apple computer. Several Mac Book Pros are in the crowd. There rest are AlBooks. I even think that some of the iMacs are recent. Needless to say my compile time is definitely slower than the rest.
I did work on my project. It’s not going so well. I have read some of his code, but I am still stuck on the design of a GUI program. My first attempt at it I hated. This time I am starting from the data structures up. GUI and desktop applications are a strange beast. You seem to be constrained by the layouut and functionality inherent in your GUI. It is what it is and it drives how the program can work.
One of the reasons for a programming vacation was to learn more about GUI and desktop application design. I feel that I have not yet reached that point. I had broached that subject with Aaron and he did bring it up in class (“start with the windows”), but it all seems wrong. I am trained as a software engineer. I don’t think I can get the hang of this very well. Let’s see about today.
We’ve been introduced to CoreData. It’s rather neat. We first built up an application without CoreData. It used some bindings and NSArrayControllers but it took some time to code. The CoreData version started off with a model. Using ER notation we modeled the data of our application. Then we dragged and dropped our entity onto a window and voila, our application was done. Compile and link and it had the same functionality as our previous version.
We hiked in the woods again, but this time the humidity was down so it was not so bad. Again, I must complain about how out of shape I am. I feel this activity in my legs. Food was good today. Steak for dinner.
I am almost done reading “Spin.” I should’ve brought another book. I had one at home but feared that I wouldn’t get through this one. How wrong I was.
Sleep.
