Coding Blogs

This is part 3 in my "Blogs I Read" series. I hope you find it useful.

ADC Headlines - Apple - Feed

I find it really useful to keep on top of the new documentation that is added to Apple's Developer Connection website. I'll often find something new I didn't know, but mostly just seeing a "how to" or bit of sample code is enough to jog my memory when I come up against a similar problem.

Big Nerd Ranch Weblog - Big Nerd Ranch Folk - Feed

The Big Nerd Ranch started as a week long immersive training experience in Atlanta, Georgia. You focus on code intensely and remotely. The one fee covers food, lodging, transportation to and from the airport. It looks like they now have a "ranch" setup in Rome, Italy. I subscribe mostly because, well, I'd like to attend there the Cocoa training some day. Also, I think it's a great idea for helping people focus. I've heard that out on The Ranch, there's no internet connection and poor cell phone reception. It's amazing what cutting out distractions can do for a learner's capacity to gain understanding. I've been to a lot of training, but nothing like this, so I guess it really appeals to me. To top it all off, Aaron Hillegass author of arguably two of the best Mac OS X programming books, is one of the Cocoa instructors there.

Cocoa Dev Central - Scott Stevenson - Feed

This is my favorite learn-about-Cocoa site. Scott Stevenson has a clean, clear style and knows how to remove the unnecessary details making his Cocoa tutorials content-dense and easy to read. The site is well designed and just looks great and I admit, for me, that counts. It is really a one stop shop for learning about Cocoa for the beginner and advanced developer alike.

Mac OS Forge - Apple - Feed

What can I say here? I'm interested to see if Apple can make their second try at open source community work. I hope they can figure it out.

Mac OS X Internals - Amit Singh - Feed

Amit has been publishing extremely interesting and low level details about Mac OS X since at least 2003. I've always enjoyed his writing and recently he published a book named Mac OS X Internals. He doesn't post very often, but when he does, it's always worth the read. One of the main reasons I value Amit's writing is the way he contrasts and compares the Mac OS with other operating systems. If OS level stuff interests you, you'll love this blog.

Martin Fowler - Martin Fowler - Feed

Martin Fowler has been around for a long time, so his seasoned opinion holds a lot of weight for me. Seems like I am continually discovering "new" ideas and programming or computer science concepts that were discovered 20 years ago! He talks about software architecture, object-oriented analysis and design, refactoring, Unified Modeling Language, software patterns, and agile software development methodologies.

TextMate Blog - Allan Odgaard - Feed

And speaking of old ideas revisited, Allan has taken ideas from the venerable emacs command line editor and put and UI on them and then added some great new ideas of his own. Just when it seemed like BBEdit had the whole text editor market tied up, along comes TextMate and really ups the innovation ante. I'm a fan because: 1) I'm learning about the editor and the blog often shows me how to do stuff I didn't understand before and 2) I love rooting for the underdog. :-) If you spend a lot of time editing text on a Mac, you've absolutely got to check out TextMate.