1. Head over to developer.apple.com and find the SystemOverview file, so that you get an idea of how OS X is built up and what environments you have available. If you don't have the programming tools, become an online developer and download them. (The files are large though.)
2. Find a good C tuturial. I used an O'Reilly book that I think was called Practical C Programming. There were a lot of small exercises which were great for learning how to make small console apps which needed data input, file access, arrays etc. Very practical book. Parts of it is definitely old and irrelevant though. I'm sure there are many newer books, I would go for one that has a Unix slant, since C and Unix share so much history, and OS X belongs to the Unix family. (You don't need to know a lot of Unix, but it's nice to know some basics.) The definite C reference is Kernighan and Richie. C and Fortran are not so different, so it shouldn't take much time to learn the basics of C. (It won't be important to know all the C standard libraries.)
3. At the developer pages, find a file called The Objective-C language. (XObjC.pdf) If you want to program under Cocoa, the native object-oriented programming environment on OS X, you'll need this. Objective-C is a small extension to straigth C.
4. Find the Currency Converter file, which is a short introduction to Cocoa, and Project Builder and Interface Builder, the main programming tools under OS X.
5. If you find that you liked the programming exercise, get a Cocoa book. I hear the one by Aaron Hillegrass is good.
6. If you don't want to go the ObjC/Cocoa way, you could buy a Java book instead of C and Cocoa books. Java and Cocoa also mix. Or you could go for C++, but I don't know much about that language (yet).
Top
