Just wondering if anyone thought they'd be able to master Objective C and failed. Like me!

Bought about 5 beginners books and wasted months on it.

And I'm a programmer by trade. ;-) PHP that is.

I'm much in the same boat. I've been programming for 32 years and a majority of that was C, PHP and JavaScript, so I know "C" based languages like the back of my hand.

Objective C has thrown me for a complete loop. Mind you, I've only bought two game development books and maybe I jumped in the wrong way, but Objective C is just wrong.

Its too much SmallTalk. The syntax I can get away with the more I use it. What I don't understand and this is my major frustration is where all the terms come from.

Like:

UITableView * tableView = [[UITableView alloc] initWithFrame:cgRct style:UITableViewStylePlain];

Where the bleep does all of that "initWith*" stuff come from? Can I make stuff up, how can I know all of this to be successful?

Well of course the answer to this is you have to know all of Apple's API calls and the bazillion different options. Like anything, when you're learning you need to start small and grow into it. Working on projects part time doesn't help either.

Then there is the pure frustration because there are a bunch of different way's to do things. I'm trying to build an SMS app that uses a TabBar controller, and a couple of table views. It mostly working, but I can't get the tableviews to load their data and there is a disconnect between the app delegate and the tableviews. All the tutorials are for setting up a single tableview and blah blah blah.

It's so frustrating. Corona SDK, while I wish it's syntax was more C like, is so much easier to learn than Objective C with clearer, easier to learn API calls.

For my RSS app, I built it in less time than I spent in Tutorials on just setting up a Tableview in objective C.

That describes me... I've been programming one language or another since I was 14 (now 38). Most recently I've been doing a lot of assembly for customization of old pinball machines. Well, I thought it would be cool to publish an app and I wanted to do it like a pro... not using some "game maker in a box" interface. After a few months of pain I gave up and went with Corona... and I'm glad I did... life is too short. ; )