Hi! Welcome to this introduction to RubyCocoa.

I am an experienced C++ and Python programmer that recently moved to the worlds of Objective-C and Ruby. Besides their intrinsic pleasures, both languages come with compelling frameworks that have helped developers do exciting things. Cocoa and Objective-C underlie many beautiful desktop applications on Apple’s OS X, and Rails has drawn thousands of developers to Ruby for its beautifully clear way of building web applications.

To me, Objective-C and Cocoa are huge improvements over similar C++ frameworks. But I’ve also had enough good experiences with Python to prefer a dynamic interpreted language for exploration and top-down software design. So when I became a Cocoa programmer, I quickly started using PyObjC to explore Cocoa and build applications. Working with Rails has led me to prefer Ruby, for reasons I’ll get into in the next chapter. That brought me to RubyCocoa.

This book is part of a personal project to learn RubyCocoa. It contains some things that I found in existing RubyCocoa documentation and many things that I’ve found by experimenting and digging through the RubyCocoa source code. I’m sure that it’s incomplete, so please send me any comments or suggestions that you have for improvement.

Thanks for reading, and happy programming,

- Tim Burks