Fareham — Apr 28th 2012

10 Members attended the meeting on programing - following on from the last meeting where we heard about the evolution of MacOS and the use of Terminal
This month the meeting featured a talk by Martin Spencely dedicated to the basics of programing and various programming languages used in the creation of MacOS and IOS applications.

He started with the basic principles of what a program does in the computer and how that is achieved by using the various computing languages.

He introduced the concept of the C family of languages and leading on to the use of Development Environment tools. The finale was the creation of a simple GUI application.

Points to remember - the Xcode Developer tools are available free from the App Store along with other developer tools.

In one of the consequential discussions that occurred during the talk was the difference in systems architecture between Windows and MacOS, two of the major differences of the way that application code is handled. ie the way that DLLs in Windows are all placed in the shared DLL library (folder) whereas the total contents of a MacOS application are kept discretely in one folder structure or package. The other big issue is the use of a Registry in Windows which covers all applications and system settings, the nearest equivalent data for Applications in MACOS are held within the App package or as Application specific user preference files. The Mac way leading to greater security and reliability by avoiding application conflicts.


Martin recommended Some books for the people who are not a complete programming novice but are interested in programming Mac or iPhone Apps. He recommend that they learn 'C' before moving on to 'Objective C'

“Programming in C (Developer's Library)” - Stephen Kochan

“Programming in Objective-C: Updated for iOS 5 and Automatic Reference Counting (ARC)” - Stephen Kochan
“Object Oriented Programming with Objective-C” - Free on iBooks.

iOS Programming: “The Big Nerd Ranch Guide” (Big Nerd Ranch Guides) - Joe Conway, Aaron Hillegass
“Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X” - Aaron Hillegass. (For Mac OS X programming)

For the absolute beginner or youngster have a look at 'Scratch' at

http://scratch.mit.edu/

or perhaps, Python (which is already installed on the Mac).
http://learn-to-program.net/index.html



The meeting rounded out with a wide ranging discussion.

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