February 11, 2012
Apple developer docs... (or: vs Java dev docs)
A thoughts of an old-school Java programmer while learning some iOS
..are not designed to be a fast-search-answer book. (search behaves bad actually). It's a tightly linked bundle of articles (with lots of html pop-up annotations!), which you have to read one after anohter. This creates a rich market of developers books, of course. But I'm not fan of overspending :-)
This stands in direct opposition to how Sun's Java docs were presented: to understand how to use library, one need to read only the class/interface descriptions (I can't remember I read package docs, anyone?); each class description is a very short and contains the concept of how it iteracts with others.
I think it comes from language differences: Java presents more plain classes without multi-file classes (.h, .m in ObjectiveC). So with proposed (by Sun?) javadoc inline style documentation Java classes are much easier to describe and support the changes.
Anyway, I spend more time to find information even in cases when I know what I'm looking for, comparing to Java SDK or ME docs or even Android docs.
For the Apple iOS docs, single place for navigating across whole bundle of articles could be very good.
..are not designed to be a fast-search-answer book. (search behaves bad actually). It's a tightly linked bundle of articles (with lots of html pop-up annotations!), which you have to read one after anohter. This creates a rich market of developers books, of course. But I'm not fan of overspending :-)
This stands in direct opposition to how Sun's Java docs were presented: to understand how to use library, one need to read only the class/interface descriptions (I can't remember I read package docs, anyone?); each class description is a very short and contains the concept of how it iteracts with others.
I think it comes from language differences: Java presents more plain classes without multi-file classes (.h, .m in ObjectiveC). So with proposed (by Sun?) javadoc inline style documentation Java classes are much easier to describe and support the changes.
Anyway, I spend more time to find information even in cases when I know what I'm looking for, comparing to Java SDK or ME docs or even Android docs.
For the Apple iOS docs, single place for navigating across whole bundle of articles could be very good.
Labels: docs, ios, java, programming
